There is an argument in favor of marketing to the perception, though. I am sure he/she is not the only viewer that might assume they are eating their own dog food and using it behind their website. We have countless tales on HN about increasing customer interest by speeding up your site. If you want to talk about how cool your tech is, make sure your website reflects a similar attention to the important details. I think the comment is legitimate for the perspective even if the technological reality is that the slowness is completely unrelated to the database.

Also, given the popularity of CRMs and so forth, it might not be good to assume that the pages are really "static". For all we know, their site is using their database to provide content -- edited by documentation/marketing folks -- to page templates.