Again: if that wasn't true, then why did people who supported the FCC rulemaking bother to pump in a ton of fake supportive comments? Why did people at the FCC try to cover up that that happened?
It absolutely is. You’re designing a complex and highly coupled system within a framework of rules and constraints. In the case of regulation, the rules and constraints come from economics, while in the case of operating systems they come from computer science. In both situations, there are no known optimal solutions—nobody has designed a mathematically optimal way regulate electricity prices, much less structure an electricity market, just like nobody has designed a mathematically optimal way to manage memory, much less structure a kernel. Thus, a lot of judgment and heuristics and trade offs are involved at every level, and the exercise of that judgment is going to depend heavily on personal philosophies. Margaret Thatcher approaches regulation very differently than Franklin Roosevelt, just as Linus Torvalds approaches operating system kernels very differently than Andrew Tanenbaum. If you hire Tanenbaum versus Torvalds to design you an OS kernel, you can expect a very different result, based on their expert judgment.
Unfortunately, a lot of people think of regulation as just picking from a menu of policy choices, and fail to realize that what you’re really doing is designing economic systems and markets.
A lot of these people vote and donate to candidates! Some even get elected to office. Therefore you cannot dismiss their impact on the regulatory process, even if you would like to.
Because it is ultimately the political process that determines which people--which personal philosophies--will have the resources and power to make regulations.
The idea that regulatory agencies act solely on the basis of research and law is not believable, because you see regulatory agencies directly reversing rulemakings that were enacted only a few years earlier (not coincidentally, during the previous administration). It beggars belief that objective research and non-partisan legal theory has changed so much in just a few years (again: spanning a presidential election) that regulations have to be revisited and reversed by new rulemakings.
Look at it this way: if FCC rulemaking doesn't take public opinion into account, why did supporters of this rulemaking feel the need to stuff the comment box with a bunch of fake, identical, supportive comments? They should have had no reason to do that, since the rulemaking was in their favor and (supposedly) being done for an objectively right reason. But the truth is, they feared the politics of it and wanted to create a counter-story that blunted the appearance of how unpopular this rulemaking was.