VW acted in bad faith and clearly exhibited the mentality you describe, but it doesn't seem to me that we know enough to determine how these few acted.
It does seem apparent the test is fairly useless. If we want to pursue this type of emissions control, everything I've read suggests that it's very possible to hit the marks in real-world conditions at the expense of power and fuel economy.
I've not read the EPA rules, but I'm sure it says something like x amount of y gas under whatever conditions.
At the end of the day, VW meets those rules.
They definitely didn't. EPA didn't just make up the term "defeat device" last month. It's in the regulation that VW was supposed to comply with.
The EPA rules also contain a NTE "not-to-exceed" limit, about 2.5x the test limit. They don't have much of an enforcement budget, so testing is pretty rare, but if the car exceeds the NTE limit, the manufacturer has to issue a recall to fix it.
At the end of the day though, all the automakers did whatever was required to make them pass the lab testing, with no regard whatsoever for what that actually means on the road.
Maybe it's good on the road, maybe it's not, but in all honesty none of them care.
VW went about it different than the rest of them (that we know about), but the end result is the same - cars that pass in the lab and do who-knows-what on the road.