It strikes me as strange and ineffectual to use the hellban on a person who is obviously a regular on the site. It's my understanding that it's intent is to cause newcomers who make low-quality contributions to quickly lose interest and leave. It can't really do its job against people who know about it.

Would the result have been different and would you have reacted differently if it was a normal ban (ie. you were made known when attempting to log in that you had been banned)?

I figured it out fairly quickly but apparently some people do not, so it may be of marginal value but I don't begrudge pg for trying it. If on the other hand if he made it hard to create a new user account that would be very bad for HN.