My optimized miner didn't hurt XMR much (we could argue this, of course, but I didn't see too much yelling). I think the difference was that Christian was public about his in an inflammatory way that made people really *feel* the inequity. It's tough when you know you're not getting what someone else is. With most currencies, you might suspect, but you don't *know* that you're behind. Because once the coins are on the exchange, it's all about the buyers and sellers. Perception absolutely is important.
I don't think it was just perception or Christian's attitude. For some reason non-advantaged miners on XMR were still able to successfully mine while a lot of people reported not being able to get anything with BBR. Maybe that is pools or maybe it is the relative difference in advantage (especially once at least modest optimizations started getting committed to the base XMR code), or both, but something definitely seemed different about the mining position of the "little guy" for a while.
I buy your original suggestion of pools. The pools for BBR were never very successful at the start, and pools make it way easier for casual miners.
My advantage on XMR was larger than Christian's advantage on BBR because of the initial bytecoin deoptimization until my tweaks were incorporated into wolf and the public miners, from comparing what Wolf's miner gets vs what CPUs were getting on the smaller (cache-resident) blockchain back then.
It's funny - and a little worrisome - how important pools are for getting people to play the mining game. I don't object to it, but it does create a somewhat scary centralization point, as we've seen with ghash.io. It would be terribly easy to 51% most coins by creating a few "independent", solid pools, offering great fees or even incentive bonuses, and going to town. I'm not sure that I buy Gun et al.'s proposal for enforcing small pools, but it's yet another important thing to consider for the long term of cryptocurrencies.