Here's the effect that this ultimately has, as far as I can see: The most reasonable people, who we would ultimately like to see build something that people use, get discouraged and go work on something else. The most stubborn, unreasonable people then charge ahead, and eventually a few of them break through via marketing and win millions or billions of users, with whatever they put together. It's a net loss.

I don't understand the value of pointing to something that died 5 years ago and where nobody even wrote a single test as a model to learn from. There's got to be better models to follow, if our goal is to point people at things to learn from. There's no need to turns things ad hominem by shifting the focus to authorship and away from the actual merits of the software: design, code quality, test coverage.