I know as well as anyone the relative futility of relying on HN, Reddit, or TC coverage for building a successful tech product. Feedback and traffic from social news is merely a blip that says next to nothing one way or another about your long-term prospects.

However, if your site goes down for any reason a postmortem of this sort is definitely warranted. The word "launch" is not signifying much more than a point in time in this case, and I think you're jumping to a lot of conclusions about what hopes they were pinning on this event.