The market decided.

This can't be the first time the courts had to liquidate assets to pay for a civil suit, right? There must be an outline of some sort for them to follow?

Shouldn’t that be a “oh well, sucks. but a sale is a sale” problem?

"A sale is a sale" works fine when both sides to the transaction are well-informed and acting for themselves. When you are selling assets for someone else's benefit, you generally have extra obligations to them, because otherwise you don't really have an incentive to achieve a good price. So courts do generally have some oversight over sale of the assets of a bankrupt estate, to ensure that the trustee is not short-changing creditors just to get the job done quickly.

A complicating factor here is that the Sandy Hook families (who as far as I know are the large majority of the creditors) also supported the sale.

So it's unfortunately not actually a sale until the judge approves it, it's just an accepted bid.
Sorta like when buying a car. The salesman tells you the price for the vehicle, overpriced perks, and how much your trade in is worth, and you accept the final price. Then the salesman has to get the floor manager to agree, which they always do, because they're the ones with authority to approve the sale. Then you can sign the paperwork and exchange money and you've actually processed the sale. Until then either party can walk away for any reason.

In this case, it's like the floor manager rejected the sale because the cash part of the sale price was less than MSRP, and they didn't think the trade in value mattered.
It's not common for the sale to get rejected, and it's even weirder for them to reject "not cash" instead of paying attention to value.

The judge saying the estate can't accept debt forgiveness in lieu of cash is just odd, since it reduces the debt more than the cash would.

Follow the money

"I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters. It’s, like, incredible.”

Note that this doesn't mean InfoWars gets sold to anyone (including the company affiliated with Jones). It means that everyone has to re-bid.

He will be named secretary of something random under tRump

It's technically the law. Bankruptcy procedures are geared to enable the return of the maximum amount of proceeds for the creditors.

Sealed bid kind of torpedos that I suppose, but considering the shit stain on history that Infowars is, I feel like an exception should have been made here.

He cares about money alright. The deposit he got from interesting parties before making this decision.

Most bids are sealed. Go bid on any construction job they are sealed. One bidder has no clue what anyone else bid. What the fuck corrupt judge is what they got there.

That's essentially what they did. They chose an auction type where each party offers as much as they're willing to pay and the highest offer wins. The Sandy Hook families included a chunk of their debt in the offer which was part of the value.