Hindsight is great and when a situation is stage managed there is limited time to make a proper assessment. Not everyone figures out how a trick is performed in a magic show.
Even if you are an expert:
This is a great point and it's something to keep in mind. I do think that many of the people wright fooled could have and should have done better, but none of us should feel confident that we couldn't have been fooled. We could have. Maybe the trick that would have fooled us would have been different or the situation that succeeded would have been different. But humans make mistakes.
But Gavin wouldn't have been appointed as Chief Scientist for his forensic or detective skills.
To be fair, the only thing that ever appointed him as Chief Scientist of anything was an organization that he, alongside Jon Matonis (Former Nchain Vice President of Strategy), Roger Ver (another prior Wright sucker, massive shitcoin promoter), Peter Vessenes (stole millions from MTGox customers and is holding up the distribution of the remaining mtgox assets with frivolous litigation), Charlie Shrem (went to jail for money laundering), and Mark Karpeles (lost customer funds at MTGox and went to jail for smaller scale embezzling) created.
There are plenty of defences that can be offered for the Bitcoin Foundation and the people involved with creating it but I don't think anyone can argue that it was some dream team of people went on to demonstrate good and careful judgement.
Validation of Wright's evidence is a question for a technical expert. Gavin had sufficient expertise to demand the right things-- he had even previously published a more or less reasonable laundry list-- and he didn't. He also knew enough to know the basic limits of his expertise, such as being unable to determine if a random windows PC had been tampered with. Most importantly, he should have known that he was being asked to participate because his enforcement would be taken as a high degree of assurance, nearly proof, by the media and the public -- and as a result deserved either an appropriately diligent vetting on his part or a refusal to participate if he was unable or uninterested in providing one.
From my perspective it was just another example of a long history of poor judgement.
The fact that anyone can be tricked is why it's so much more important for people who will be perceived to be an authority to make an extra effort to not get tricked or just not play along. So I think here the issue isn't so much that wright tricked him, it's that he shouldn't have been exposed in the first place, and that to this day he still has do little to nothing to walk back the damage. Wright suckers still continue to cite his equivocation as evidence to support wright. I think Ver is one of the less ethical people around cryptocurrency, and yet even Ver did better and eventually provided an unequivocated statement against wright's claims.