As far as I can tell the only thing MIT did that was disagreeable was not pushing harder against the felony variant of the CFAA charges.

"creating, contributing" member or not, Aaron didn't deserve extra privileges (or warrant worse punishment) compared to anyone else who had DDoS'ed MIT's network and repeatedly gained unauthorized access to their internal subnet.

MIT should not have allowed themselves to be used in throwing the book, but I would hardly call them a bunch of absolute shits over this.