Additionally, given the trouble Theo's got into on a number of occasions for criticisng bits of the government, it seems fairly unlikely that he would've been comfortable with the project taking NSA money.

Most plausible situation: Corporation said "here's money, implement ALL the things", OpenSSL figured it was a good way to get the useful things paid for plus some stuff that potential future sponsors might find useful in marketing material.

As for whether said Corporation had additional, non-obvious motives, I make no guess either way.

But misdirection does not, frankly, seem appropriate to describe the explanation given, and your scare quotes suggest you're appealing to emotion rather than presenting an actual argument. Do feel free to present one if you have one, though, it's entirely possible I misunderstood.

1) Were flaws introduced into the technology which potentially reduce the strength of the encryption?

2) Did OpenSSL know about it?

It seems the answers can be yes and no without any real stretch.

If you are, say, the NSA, asking / paying for a whole standard to be implemented (a) gets the bit you want implemented and (b) hides what you're really interested in from anyone wondering and looks less suspicious. Once it's in they could either start pushing for it to become a default, push for people to voluntarily choose it (get people speaking at conferences to recommend it or whatever), or just leave it knowing that a few people would use it and that works for them too.

But the fact that OpenSSL probably weren't complicit doesn't change the fact that elements of the product need to be considered potentially flawed.

1) the mailing list post states that OpenSSL wants to be comprehensive, even when that means providing implementations of algorithms that you probably shouldn't use. The inclusion of weak, or even broken, algorithms does not undermine the product as a whole given this mission. It has no impact on the effectiveness of other, stronger algorithms in OpenSSL.

2) OpenSSL knew that one of the algorithms in the standard was weak, but thought it was still valuable to implement the standard. again, the comprehensiveness goal means it's up to the end users to utilize OpenSSL in a manner consistent with their use case.

I believe you need to be compliant with everything in the spec to be validated.

Not that it matters much anyway. The result is the same.

It had a bug anyways, nobody ever used dual ec with openssl.