In my experience, there's an abundance of people just barely able to fire up their favorite IDE and hack something together in some kind of rapid prototyping web 2.7 thingamajig they don't even understand fully, preferrably using the latest JS(-based) framework and a (seemingly) random combination of currently hip "stack" technologies and packing all this on about 5 to 10 'cloud' instances without any knowledge of anything beyond the web.

So, while I agree with your 'Or at least, it's supposed to :)', there's an awful lot of people whose claim to 'Hackerdom' is going to some kind of 'Hacker School' or '-Weekend'.

    > This is 'HackerNews'

Which is exactly the intended user base of this app. The "crowd" in this case is community non-members.