Did we read the same article? Vinh was very respectful to the alternative design.

That article you linked to contains a lot of unneeded and useless criticism of the Times that was only peripherally related to any actual design aspects of the site. When he goes off about ads, he's no longer talking about site redesign and is instead advocating that they change their business model.

He's certainly free to throw his $0.02 in along with the rest of the peanut gallery about how he thinks the newspaper industry should run their business - but it tarnishes what was supposed to be an interesting look at a web site redesign.