Stephenie Meyer spent years writing the Twilight books. Time spent on a work is in no way indicative on the quality of that work.
Reaction from literary critics? Reaction from the target audience? Financial success?
It seems to me that by two of those standards Stephenie Meyer knocked the ball out of the park. It is not clear to me why we should care about the other standard of quality.
Personally, I agree with some of his essays, but on some others he's way off the mark. For instance, his writings on anything Hollywood or copyright-related betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what artists sell. Yet those essays were extremely popular simply because they confirmed people's biases (hence "pop philosophy"). However, if you check the so-called "blogosphere", you can find many others who have posted well-reasoned criticisms of those (and other) essays.
Yeah, I think this is a fairly good characterization of pg's audience.
All of those people are academics par execellance. I'm not talking about business-ified institutional academica. I'm talking about spending a long time on a topic, researching it and thinking deeply, clearly on it before you offer your opinion as though it were valuable.
pg spent weeks on each of his early essays. He spent a solid month writing What You Can't Say. He spent at least a couple days writing this one. They aren't opinion pieces.