How do they come up with this level of incompetence.?
It's pretty classic. Having dealt with compliance issues for several registrars over the years, it happens that indeed once in a while management of a larger organization will grab someone and say "hey, run the registrar, and ask JB if you run into any problems." No one is born knowing the umpteen dozen things you need to know, but on other hand ICANN does require that anyone running a registrar designate someone to take their training course:
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/registrar-training-resources-2015-09-23-en
Take it. It's fun.
But, anyway, ICANN requires someone in the organization to have done that. Typically, that person or persons will eventually move on, and new people will not even know the course exists.
So, they will look at what is going on, such as at Epik, and say, "Aha, the problem is that people are moving their names out," review the process and decide to come up with the brilliant idea of making people jump through flaming hoops.
For example, there was once a registrar who required registrants to download a form, fill it out, sign it, and mail it to an address on a South Pacific island, in order to approve a transfer. Oh, and they had to receive the form within something like four days of the transfer request.
That was one of the original issues tackled by the first ICANN Transfer Policy working group since, among other things, once Network Solutions was no longer the monopoly registrar, one of the primary growth pathways for new registrars was to persuade people to transfer their names out of Network Solutions. It took quite a few years for Netsol's dominance to fade, and I'd be willing to bet that a good chunk of their customer base consists of people who still think they are the only place to register a name.
