Fascinating. I just read your PDF in full. My impression/suspicion is that the decision author DOES fundamentally understand texting, ride sharing, and your complaint, but carefully feigned the right misunderstandings (eg insisting that since the driver's text was proxied through Lyft, it had to be assumed that that was "Lyft talking" even though that makes little sense) was able to swing the outcome in a way to protect the driver and put all the blame on Lyft.

It's just intuition so maybe I'm wrong, but it's interesting if true, if the T&LC has a bias towards protecting drivers. I can imagine many ways that might have come about

Sounds like an incompetent regulator is what we should be complaining about and I'd put having an incompetent regulator at being strictly worse than no regulator because our taxes are wasted paying for that regulator. Our time is wasted dealing with it. And we deprive the free market of coming up with a solution.