Anopheli

The error is an oversight, a human error. Honestly, one that's understandable. The complexity of a game like EVE is absolutely insane, and even minor alterations can have large repercussions in areas that are widely separated.

The viability of Planetary Interaction is extremely important to CCP's long term plans. They've clearly stated that they intend to replace enormous swaths of NPC provided goods with PI products. This entails turning off one of their main ISK drains in the sink that is EVE's economy and handing over a large amount of territory to players. If the market is sabotaged, PI will be very unattractive on a large scale, and its use may be relegated to player corps and alliances that can manage in-house production of these items. Players uninterested, or unwilling to invest in this sort of production would be at the mercy of a very broken economy.

Let's also not forget that Dust 514 is meant to directly tie into the EVE universe through Planetary Interaction mechanics - in short CCP has an entire future game riding on the success of this system. I'd expect some pretty serious action to be taken to resolve this.

The two solutions I've seen so far are to dilute the value of the existing Tier 4 products, simply by changing quantities (eg. increase quantities produced and required a factor of100, reduce volume of the items by a factor of 100). The alternative is to purge these existing items from existence in the EVE universe, deleting all instances of these items existing from the DB, or depreciating them (think Melted Snowballs). The latter method would likely be somewhat more unpopular, and would have to be done before the command centers roll out on the 8th. Since these Tier 4 items can't be produced as intended, any that exist currently are as a result of exploiting NPC sold products through reprocessing. A full rollback is probably not in the works, as it would penalize the entire playerbase for the abusive actions of relatively few individuals.