I bet you any Colgan 1900 guy in the Northeast could have told you that the ramp agents were dead wrong about that TSA provision. You can ALWAYS let them out of security areas, you just can't get them back in.
I do find it hilarious the CO and XE did absolutely nothing to help out the situation by blowing through the 3 hour mark and then doing absolutely nothing. I bet any airline, including mine, would have done the same. I've worked as a dispatcher and as an ops manager, what xpressjet operations did was braindead. No offense to the pilots, and I understand it's monday quarterbacking, but the ops book says after three hours you go into emergency mode to get those pax off. Of course, if everyone has heard all this soap boxing before then I apologize in advance.