I don't know quine at all and can't easily understand exactly what all these guys are doing but:

This is obviously NOT a stable metagame; in both senses.

If we ran this tournament again the random-bots would get utterly destroyed (since it's very easy/fast to check for them and defect). If we ran this tournament with multiple rounds, where successful strategies survive and unsuccessful die, and there was even one defect-against-randombot code in the mix, it will win if it doesn't die early.

My guess-happy summary of what happened is this: The core problem is very hard, so most people instead did something simple, often very simple (cooperate bot, defect bot, random bot - which won!) with a small number of people trying for real. The people trying for real, however, spent all their energy planning for other people trying for real and trying to fool them, rather than trying to act correctly against all the super-simple programs, because if you put in that much work you think other people will mostly put in at least some work (R has an entire long blog post of metagame and strategic analysis which is COMPLETELY wrong in exactly this way, in real life I do this a lot). That, combined with programming errors since the task involved was actually hard, prevented them from winning.

The lesson here, I think, is more about how people react to such tournaments than it is about the actual problem at hand; if anyone had assumed their opponents would either be simple or hopelessly complex, they could have written a program that defects against programs that don't look at their code or otherwise are clearly safe defections, does something hard to exploit against everyone else that likely is somewhat random, and win easily.