Your observations are pretty astute – we made Asteroids Inc. as a parable about the oil industry, and to a lesser extent corporations in general, so it's good to hear a lot of this came through in the game itself. I* can confirm that pretty much everything you wrote about here was by design.
For example, many oil companies' stock values are based on how much oil they have found, but they can never sell all of that or it'll be enough to destroy civilization several times over with global warming and whatnot. So the stockholders are investing in this "carbon bubble", as it's often called, even though it can never actually make them money in a practical sense. In Investors Inc. – erm, Asteroids Inc. – we designed the investment system to reflect this. Your business has a natural limit – number of asteroids and quality of the world, which actually gets destroyed here if you don't quit and close your business down – but the real money's in fooling the investors. So that's the sort of thing that guided the game design process, unconventional mechanics and all.
If you have any more feedback about how Asteroids Inc. turned out, it'd be great to hear it so we can incorporate it into future games and projects. (But even if you don't, it means a lot just hearing what you said already, and knowing that you played the game through – even if, as you said, "the only winning move is not to play".)
*Aidan Andreasen, the game's designer, by the way.