HN can definitively be brutally dismissive of things that doesn't match current perceived wisdom of what is the right way of doing things, much beyond the initial few comments.

But I don't think there's a way around that while maintaining open discussion. At least here the disagreements are mostly civil.

Part of what makes announcements like this tricky on HN, and what I think triggered the comment you replied to, is that while part of HN values "cool hacks" and simplicity greatly, part of HN evaluates everything based on whether it's useful at scale, as a product, right now, and can grow big (there's certainly a big overlap, and I'm oversimplifying), and an announcement relating to a commercial project that aims for the former crowd unsurprisingly strokes some of the latter crowd entirely the wrong way as a weird niche project seemingly massively lacking in the features they think are essential.

I think that with DragonRuby that is particularly unavoidable. What makes some of us find it awesome is an inherently alien way of thinking to a lot of people in a way that look backwards to many.