Actually you can pretty much thank Kate Hanni for this mess. She's the one who pushed that whole passenger's bill of rights thing. Basically if the plane is going to be on the ground for 3 hours or more they have to give you the option to get off. Now that doesn't mean when the plane is taxiing out ready to take off, but some airlines would still do that because it's too easy to get fined on this one. And we are talking something like $26,000 per passenger on that plane.
At 4pm you would have been told to stay close to the gate so that when it was time to go you could quickly board and go. As you now know things in the New York area broke down pretty quickly, so they had no choice but to end up canceling the flight. But again, due to the passengers rights thing they had to give yo the option to get off in the first place.
Wen the crew timed out they would have started working on a replacment crew before your plane was even parked at back at the gate. But again with everything going on, that may not have ended up happening. More than likely what happened was that they were going to use a crew that was coming in on a flight, and in the end that flight never got to Newark.
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