A site full of hackers is good at picking apart a naive technical idea... not so much a naive design idea.
The bigger irony is if you had these discussions on news.ydesigninator.com, the designers would have no opinion at all on the code, because they would realize that they know nothing. But with visual arts, it's easy for us programmers to bike-shed and act like we know something.
I think the best designers get this "real world" aspect of news. Hopefully same goes for you programmers.
They didn't force that change, you can just turn it off.
Looking just now I have the old style tab, if I click it the sidebar pops open, there's a "cog" for settings in the bottom right corner. IIRC you have to set yourself as "unavailable" to all and then use the cog to select "hide sidebar". Try that.
In the last week or two, Facebook changed their messaging UI so that you cannot get a list of all your buddies that are online to chat (it guesses who you would care to see) among other mostly cosmetic changes. AFAIK there is no way to use the chat UI that was available a month ago now (or see if a particular person is online unless you specifically type in their name).
>What WSGI should have been.
That sentiment goes through nearly the entire page. And it's the same problem. But yes, it attracts more critique here because (I'd imagine) the majority of vocal ones here are less designery and more programmery.
Meanwhile some designer suggests that the New York Times trash their entire business and turn it into an ugly looking blog (with padding!) and it gets 500 upvotes.
At least the Pump/WSGI proposal was genuine interest and enthusiasm and not condescending.
This is a total repeat of the American Airlines redesign thread [1], which everybody should be familiar with. Some things are the way they are for good reason, and the reasons are usually very good when you are referring to a successful product or a billion-dollar company.
[1] http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html