Sure it makes sense to do it the way you describe...assuming you have unlimited time to man 7 different points of potential contact, indefinitely, and the ability to shoot at and hit a moving target in the dark. When you look at it that way, using a radio tag to locate your quarry makes much more sense, on many different levels. Besides, they didn't ever "know" where the target would be...they took an educated guess as to seven locations, and got lucky with one of them. Whether they can duplicate that luck also remains to be proven.
That's a good point actually, I forgot that they had seven target areas 🙂 when I look at it that way you're right it makes sense to try and located areas it hangs around or spends portions of it's time at and focus attention on those areas. I found the report pretty well written if I'm honest and the way they deduced what could and could not have been tracked was pretty reasonable.