Oddly, the native applications rarely seem to have much impact unless it's doing a hard task, like video encoding.
To answer your question, I think that NoScript users tend to appreciate (and even expect) minimalism... consequently some get irritated when even a simple blog can't load without JS. I get the appeal of the minimalist, standards-adhering, machine-parseable website, but it's not a big source of emotion for me :P
I also suspect that a lot of people, like myself, still consider the WWW a linked document system rather than a fat client application terminal, we just want documents with links to other documents, and sometimes simple forms.
I've been a no-script user for 3 days. I'd say the experience is better until I hit a useful site that requires javascript - when this happens it takes one or two attempts to enable javascript properly.
I would not recommend it for people for people who do not like messing around with their browsers. However, I intend to stay with no-script because page loads are faster and incredibly little functionality is missing.
Using NoScript does not mean "functionality missing". It's just disabled by default - and personally, most of the time I find the "missing functionality" unnecessary, and in most of places where it's not I already have a whitelist entry in place.
HN works perfectly. Lots of pages even work better with NoScript, as it basically cuts a lot of bloat. If some don't, enabling JS is one click away.
Anyway, there are lots of pages which are kind of expected to not work correctly without JavaScript - and that's fine. But if for instance Hacker News wouldn't work in its current form without JS, that would be a valid thing to complain about, because there's absolutely no reason for that. There are even some pages that implement loading animation in JS in a way that when JS is disabled, the whole page is obstructed by loader that never disappears - and that's just reckless coding that should be fixed.
<sigh>