Usually there's a grace period where the owner can still renew it, and before anyone else can. If the domain actually expired 60 or 90 days ago then they're probably hosed.
Yes you are correct about that... It happened to me once on an old domain and I was able to get it back in the following week after expiration but I don't recall seeing a parked page during that period of time.
Doing a quick Whois for nodejs.org show that the name is expiring today:
eNom does all kinds of shady shenanigans with domain renewals. There are stories of names going up on their auction block the moment the registration expires (meaning someone has to pay a greatly inflated amount of cash to reclaim the name)
Unlikely. As much as enom sucks I don't think one could misconstrue any of their ineptitude as evil. They do however have the redemption period at inflated prices, but I've never heard of them moving an expired domain to immediate auction.
None of those reference enom directly -- only resellers of enom. That's like saying I bought a widget off amazon & chase paymentech is fraudulent as a result.
