I notice they've continued their defense in an update to the blog post:
"One more small note: Much has been said about a line of code in our XMPP library that supposedly is a sign of bad practice — this line is not used for anything security-sensitive. It is not a security weakness. It came as part of the third-party XMPP library that Cryptocat uses."
To make sure I'm not just going on innuendo, I read into SASL authentication a bit ... seems `cnonce' is pretty important:
Am I dead wrong, or are you hand-waving to defend your product?