Is there any reason that in this case and in the case of the parent comment, there's a tendency to jump to conclusions about the intelligence level of the test/puzzle writer? Do truly intelligent people never write lousy questions?

When I was young, I was furious at "Skip the first letter, keep every other letter, and what does it spell?" Data was something like "ghfeklmlto", and my answer was "hfeklmlto", of course.