You figured it out. People didn't like the article because they're too stupid to read that many words. Or they were confused by the title.

It's not cause the tone is accusatory, or because it rambles, or compares mission critical life-or-death Apollo software with the unimportant web and native applications we write now. Yep, it's cause people are too dumb to look at that many words without a beer commercial dropped in the middle of it.

Saying "people who disagree with my opinions are too stupid to understand the subtlety of the point" is the rhetorical equivalent of denial in the Kubler-Ross sense of the word.

Or writing at higher level than a 12 or 13 year old :-)

Beyond the grammatical errors, misplaced punctuation and misspellings, and despite the relative novelty of the anecdotes, I thought the writing itself was dull and simplistic. Many paragraphs were just a string of blunt statements without any independent clauses.

According to a copy+paste of the text into http://sarahktyler.com/code/sample.php, the article as a whole reaches Flesch-Kindaid grade level 7.

So, it was written such that a 7th grader could read it. How is that a bad thing?

Edit: I pasted a sample of John D MacDonald in there and it showed a level of 6.61. Poor John, no wonder he was never a success. /S

Your comment isn't really addressing mine from the context in which it was given. My comment was in reply to someone implying criticism of the piece stems from its reading level being above that of a 12 or 13 year old, which isn't the case.

I'm simply proposing that the criticism is founded on actual flaws with the piece, rather than it being too complex to be understood by its detractors.

It was what your comment implied to me - that is some one with a low level of English reading comprehension who needs short simple sentence structure.