His work ethic has been criticized in the past because features introduced in one version of Minecraft would be abandoned by the next and remain incomplete. Bugs would remain unfixed for long stretches of time. There wasn't a public bug tracker (if there was any at all), so users had to list bugs themselves on a fan wiki page.
To claim that criticm is "antisocial" and that we should instead treat him as a best friend to have a beer with is an odd notion. Unless Notch is your personal friend, he is just a programmer working at a company, and the only relationship you have with him is as a customer. If you sell something, get used to criticism.
He doesn't have to be a whiz programmer with iron dedication. He just had to have the smarts to hire one to take over the project. Which he did.
Where does one find such friends?
Yes. And since I am fully aware of my tendency to lose interest in projects part way through and move on to something else, I don't publicize them while they are in the "hey this idea sounds cool" stage. Thus avoiding having people point out the objective reality that I don't finish much of what I start.
You guys should really give Notch a break. He's a human like everyone else. It must be incredibly hard to work under the pressure of 100,000 derisive hackers that will use every opportunity to point out why he is inadequate. My reaction on this story is rather to call him up and go have a beer and relax somewhere. That's what you do when someone fails a project. You don't start pointing out all his previous flaws and explaining why his effort was doomed in the first place. That's antisocial. Can you imagine saying something like this to his face? Can you imagine someone saying this to your face?