Ignoring the quadrennial debate about figure skating even being a sport - and it's not - I'm pretty sure that Wier didn't even care. He didn't do this for the medals, he did it for the PR, because the only money you can make in figure skating is on the tour.
It's just the reverse of what, had you been watching, happened first to Surya Bonaly and then Tonya Harding. Both of whom never won despite being the strongest athletes in a supposed athletic competition. Hell, back in the early 90s Bonaly did two things that no other female skater has ever done since then, a backflip landing on one blade, and quadruple toe loop jump. Yet she somehow lost on 'artistic merit' to some drunk Russian chic who was far closer to the ice princess model the judges demand. Nancy Kerrigan of course was the perfect ice princess, white, upper-middle class, with a mind that can only be described as vacuous, and a personality that personifies the word 'bitch.' There is little doubt, as Tonya tried to say over and over again, that it's those elements, not the skating elements, that the judges really score on. Nancy fit the model, Tonya did not.
So then you get Wier who is the perfect reverse of the above, a great skater but a ->-bleeped-<-ty athlete. His training schedule, by his own admission, is not even close to what the others are putting in. On the other hand, the time he's not devoting to the technical program he spends doing PR, and that he has such a huge fan base, his own TV show, and all that, prove that the time is well spent if your after fortune and fame and not a medal.
There has been a great deal made of the changes in the scoring that went into effect this Olympics that put a far greater stress on the tricks/stunts/'technical elements' and downplayed the artistry. It's particularly true for the radical change in doubling the point values for the elements in the second half, so that a quad landed at the end of the routine is worth twice what it get at the beginning. For sure those changes hurt Weir's chances. But I also think that had the HUGE change not occurred in the 1990s, to eliminate the compulsory figures that gave figure skating its name, then I doubt if Weir would have even made the team. In pre-90s skating most people were eliminated long before the programs were even skated.
If your really interested in the whole figure skating and gender deal you should read Ellyn Kestnbaum's book Culture on Ice: Figure Skating And Cultural Meaning who could have told you Wier would lose before anyone even laced up a skate.
