Not that this necessarily exactly translates to the FWC situation (since I'm not at all in law enforcement, or government, or conservation biology), but my own academic PhD department was extensively connected to industry, namely health care (many of the faculty were bioethicists, including three members of my committee).
None of the implications you're making about the disconnect between the deciders and the academics ring true based on my admittedly second-hand experience. Academics are not generally likely to sell their souls by putting their names on a paper they're not fully behind -- that's not to say exceptions can't be found, but the blanket claim about "sharing one's credentials" just doesn't wash.
Nor is it remotely credible to compare the experiences of people "who’ve spent decades working with the animals in question" in captive and business settings to academic conservation biologists in this particular context; flipping reptiles or running expos or breeding feeder insects is not relevant expertise in invasive species management.
"outside of the study in which someone in the FWC was actually involved in" -- it isn't just one study. Inside FWC's umbrella is the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, which has an $83 million budget ($13 million of which goes to wildlife research).
http://fwcresearch.com/publications/
https://wec.ifas.ufl.edu/coop/
Just to be clear, the relevant laws under discussion here sound pretty far off base to me too. That's not why I'm disagreeing (see: 'not in conservation biology', above). I'm disagreeing with the culpably false claims and fallacious reasoning that are employed (here and in the larger discussion) to argue against the effectiveness of those laws.
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