You didn't kill the discussion. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but not everyone's is necessarily informed. Pointing out that people who only have a casual, indirect understanding of the material at hand should keep this in mind when attempting to critique the paper is a perfectly valid, non-elitist, thing to point out. Quite frankly, even if I were to read the paper, I probably would not have enough understanding to make an informed opinion on the subject. I can give a bunch of javadoc class descriptions to a neurosurgeon. But that doesn't mean that she'll have the prerequisite knowledge to make sense of it.

We should celebrate our specialties and the amount of narrow and deep knowledge required to become experts in them instead of having our egos tripped up because we can't have our intelligence validated in every single domain.