It's interesting that none of the quotes from Torch and Theano folks indicate any shortcomings of Tensorflow, their sole counterargument is that using tensorflow might give Google more control.
Hiya, I wrote the article. What might not be captured here is that this is above all a community of people all working on AI so it's not like anyone is really emotional and/or aggressive about this issue. It's more that it's always better for an ecosystem to have multiple dominant players who are all relatively equal. Torch & Theano people were saying it's non-optimal if TF becomes the majority framework, which is a fair point. Everyone I spoke to for this article said TF was engineered well, albeit a bit of a black box in certain aspects.