The gist as I understand it is: NIST tilted the playing field repeatedly so that their favorite would win, and their favorite is not the best new candidate and not even better than existing systems.

Re: style, this seems longer and more rambling than usual, but other stuff on his blog has been long, and his style with lots of background, asides, references, self-quotes seems pretty distinctive, isn't it?

But I'm sure you paid more attention to this than me.