This is something you see time and time and time and time and time again in any kind of social circle that has a competitative structure, especially in religion.

The constant focus on being better than your peers, being more extreme, it combined with loosing track of anything but “winning”, even when there is no way to objectively “win”.

In this case, these guys change the rules at a whim, trying make them and their followers look better than the rest. This sounds an awful lot like the deadly sin pride…