Am I being sensitive or is this an
unnecessarily spiteful reply from Greg Maxwell?:
...
You've shown that you can throw a bunch of symbolic markup and mix in a lack of understanding and measurement and make a pseudo-scientific argument that will mislead a lot of people, and that you're willing to do so or too ignorant to even realize what you're doing.
He sounds bitter.
Oh boo hoo, poor Peter got mildly but most-deservedly flamed for spouting pseudo-scientific nonsense on stilts. He'll be in therapy for years!

Gmax is just understandably impatient with his job being made harder by the Gavinistas' endless defamation, exaggerations, BS, and agitprop:
Gmax is not a punching bag; he's allowed to hit back when people accuse him of obstructionism for personal profit. The Gavinista whining about 'ad hom' in that context is spectacularly hypocritical. "I'll post the napkin pic illustrating Evil Blockstream's Snidely Whiplash scheme, then tsk-tsk Gmax for reacting with anything more than cool professional detachment...that'll show everyone what Awful People the core devs are!"
But nevermind that, let's all weep for poor barbequed Peter. I'll send him some aloe vera lotion, care of the burn ward.

Gmaxes argument lives and dies on his assertion of 80ms block validation times. We now have to go off and independently verify this. Then we have to figure out the discrepancy between this number and the painfully slow sync times and 100% cpu use during sync. This work may discover inefficiencies and result in optimizations that have nothing to do with the holy war going on. Peter is looking at the system as a black box and analyzing its emergent properties. Gmax is looking inside the box. We need to resolve the contradiction.
Regardless gmaxes argument was not a barbecue -- that would have happened if the math was flawed for example. In fact gmax's "argument" is just another guy making an unsubstantiated (but likely true) contrary claim. You know this because what if you run core and post "that's funny I am seeing 5 sec times"? What happens is gmaxes entire argument fails.
Its sad that you can't tell the difference between an argument and an unsubstantiated claim.