I apologize for making my comment so hyperbolic and you are right to call me out for dishing on them unfairly.
I'm familiar with Hodinkee and in general I think favorably of them.
They've brought some necessary web polish to an industry where publicity has a very grubby old school feel to it. Personally, I've used Hodinkee as a jumping off point to do some research into watches I might want to own some day and the site has only made firmer my love for the Nomos house.
That being said, as a journalistic outlet the site is still very much a show run by amateur enthusiasts. This is not inherently a problem, plenty of fields get covered by people early in their career. But there is something specific to luxury watches that makes it unable to feed in or out of the ecosystem of writers and limits the people working there to the kind of people who can be interested in very expensive jewelry.
Compare this profile to one's done by people who specialize in the craft - Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic on Obama, Caity Weaver at GQ, or closer to the tech world Adrian Chen at the New Yorker and Steven Levy at Wired - and you can see the core editorial and writing skills simply aren't there and likely never will be.