I'm in a game where I saw my opponent evolve his gang to Evict 3, so I put a trap down on my full trading house. The next turn he used his master thief to burgle the trading house (he hadn't yet), trigger the trap, then brought in his gang to evict all 3 urchins. In an AI game, I tried the same strategy, but with different units. I sent an evicting urchin in to trigger a trap, intending to follow that with a truant officer. In that game, the urchin triggering the trap then "blocked" the square, preventing the truant officer from entering. I have a couple questions about the intent of the trap mechanic.
1) Is the trap mechanic designed to be outmaneuvered by an investment in 2 actions?
2) In all other instances, the trap makes the attacker fail at his intended goal. Should that be consistent with the master thief too (i.e. he fails to scout/burgle the location, and it remains inaccessible to his other units)? I didn't ask my opponent if he suffered any loss to his master thief after triggering the trap, beyond the 1g. If he didn't lose his AP though, he could just burgle (trigger trap), then burgle again.