Out of curiosity, Cat how did your players thumb their noses at you? What were they doing? Were they being disruptive? Did their behavior bring the game to a screeching halt?
I'm not trying to be combative, I am honestly curious about why you feel the situation should have been handled like it was and why you feel your players were insulting you.
Back in the good old days (mind you this was the early 90s just after SR2 and the core books for it hit and we'd already began expanding on them for our specific situations - I can't even remember if Edges and Flaws were "official" at that point) and we were all college students, meaning, in retrospect, a ton of free time which we filled with RPGs of various types. It was not at all unusual for the group to decide they wanted a gigantic central plot running for a full semester or even a full "year" of school (think the Harley duo but far far longer). These games were different from the "what's tonight's mission?" games because they operated on a far larger scale. They would have these sub-missions that seemed unconnected, but somehow tied into one side or the other's plans, and often would account for anywhere from 30 to 40 sessions (or more when we were playing more often) to get from one end of "giant plot from hell" to the other. Above all, everyone involved in the game had previously agreed to partake in this gargantuan thing that the GM was putting together at their request. It usually consisted of starting with a good "big" idea that was barely more than an outline and a mission or two, and then working to stay well ahead of the group on the "next time on the shadowrunner show" treadmill and fleshing out the outline over time.
Now, a bit about this group. We'd been playing together for a few years at that point, from AD&D to SR1 and 2 to Tales From the Floating Vagabond and we even did the old FASA Dr Who RPG for a short while. I'd both played and GMed with them in all those systems. They, for their part, were wonderfully predictably unpredictable. They were the sort of group that could absolutely murder a play session chasing a clue you actually named Red Herring or trying to purchase ammunition (NEVER let these people "go shopping" or you're in it for two sessions, a firefight or three and very likely someone is going to the hospital) and have a BALL with it, which keeps the GM and the players on their toes. They also loved when their backgrounds and personalities came into play. As the number of sessions climbed and they settled into the characters and the GM became more and more aware of what each character was about, things would start popping up directly "for" specific characters. For instance, lets say you had a pacifistic character who was regularly pulling out the credstick and delivering medical supplies to parts of the Barrens. On one run you encounter a problem in the Barrens and one of the communities you've been assisting puts their necks on the line to hide you and your team. A few sessions later, the Mob Boss you owe a big favor to from 5 sessions ago calls it in and wants you to wack someone and saying "no" to him is not a good option. These sorts of things popped up regularly in this group.
They could also be hilariously cruel to one another. In an AD&D game the fighter gave the starting thief a "Ring of Invulnerability" to use in a particularly hard dungeon. The thief survived the entire dungeon without so much as a scratch and "forgot" to give the ring back. Several sessions later the thief attempted to backstab something ridiculously powerful (I want to say a Lich King) and naturally got completely murdered. When he complained about the having the ring the player of the fighter said, "you mean the +1 Ring of Fire Resistance I gave you?" and then the laughing started; his survival to up that point had been pretty much luck of the dice.
This was the type of players in this group.
In this particular incident, we were roughly half way through one of those grand "epic adventures." We'd been back from winter break for a week or two and were a few sessions into the "getting out the cobwebs" restart of the runs. The primary player in the incident had had a disastrous time in the previous session. For some reason, everything she tried either went south on her, was completely wrong or the dice simply decided they hated her. She had survived the run mostly because I have a pet GMing Rule that I will never let JUST the dice kill you. If your idea is sound, the execution is good and at that pivotal moment you roll a dozen ones, once we finish marveling at your skill at rolling ones, you will survive; you may be badly hurt, you may blow the whole mission, but those dice will not be the only thing that kills you. If the idea is insanely stupid, the execution goes up like a lead balloon and THEN you roll the dozen ones, you are a greasy spot on the floor.
At that point it the "run of Runs" everyone was pretty tied into the plot and metaplot running through the game, not so much someone leaving the group or a character dying couldn't be handled, but still very tightly tied into events. Her Shaman was functioning as the primary point of contact for new missions and was the de-facto "face" for the group. The downtime between runs was fairly short between those two, we usually had a month or so "lay low time" in between, but in this case, there was around a week's lag between the end of the last mission and the start of this one. During the week, she'd taken some good natured ribbing from pretty much everyone about the disaster that was the previous run and I think that contributed to her pulling another player aside and coming up with the "we're in a relation" subplot. All well and good, a bit sudden, but fine by me as the GM because that's just more places for me to go with the drama.
Before that night's session, someone had asked, "we really messed up the whole thing last week, didn't we?" To which I replied something to the effect of, "after GMing for you guys this long I don't think there is anything you guys could do that I cannot incorporate into the plotline."
We'd just finished the summary of "what did you do in the last week" (one thing we did metagame was they always knew OOC how much downtime they would have before the next job offer and could make decisions IC based on that since it just made things easier for spending money and karma) when she popped up with the "I'm pregnant" announcement and a nice little "let's see you fit THIS into the plotline" grin. We started and finished that session per usual, had a conversation about it afterwards and I said, "fine, we can go with that."
So I DID bring it into the plotline along with all the good and bad that came with it.