Agreed; the criticism here is way too harsh. In particular, I think it's somewhat amusing that people are giving him grief for wanting to "jump to C as soon as possible." Any rational kernel developer wants to jump to C as soon as possible -- and wants as much of the system to be in C as possible. (Indeed, this is the ethos that drove Unix -- and separated it from the horrifically unportable systems that predated it.[1])

Further, there are some good ideas here -- in particular, jumping directly to long mode allows one to avoid much of the replaying of the history of the PC that one is historically required to do to boot an x86. Most civilians (and I dare say, most of the negative commenters here) have NFI how ugly this process is and how much of a drag it is on future development. With the decline of the PC, it's reasonable to believe that a future is coming in which x86 becomes primarily a server-side microprocessor -- and begins to shed much of the baggage from the misadventures of the 1980s and 1990s.

All that said: there is a certain arrogance of youth here, and one hopes that when reality has sandblasted it away, the resulting humility will find its way to a formal computer science education and ultimately into professional software engineering; our discipline needs more people who have dared to write an OS from scratch, not fewer.

[1] http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/cacm.html