While I don't have personal experience in this area (yet), everything here seems to be symptomatic of the issues within the structure of academia itself, and the students could very well just be victims of the machine. If so, bashing their misguided efforts like this doesn't seem like it would be constructive for anybody.

Being passionate about a subject is all well and good, but it isn't always the best state for communication/cooperation/problem-solving, which seems to be ultimately what you want here.