Please omit such offensive/defensive rhetoric from your posts to HN. It adds no information and is bad for conversation.
The problem here isn't "daring" to criticize, it's rejecting the unfamiliar. This is like traveling to a new country and complaining because they cook everything wrong and say everything wrong. Unfamiliarity is relative—it's not a property of the thing you're reacting to. Same with readability: it's relative to the reader.
In some contexts this is obvious. If you don't know German, you wouldn't reject a German text as unreadable or poorly written. But in other contexts, when we unconsciously assume or were taught that there's only one valid way to do something, we react with shock and distaste at work that violates known conventions. Such work may in fact be organized around different conventions for reasons we don't yet see. Good conversation across such boundaries requires a bit of distance from our own assumptions.
Programming is like the world of art this way. There are countless examples in art history of sharp departures from convention provoking shock and distaste, and people saying things like "There's a reason why readable and beautiful [art] is favoured". Riot police famously had to be called to the early shows of the Impressionists, yet the beauty of their paintings is obvious to us now.
