I read his snark as being self-deprecating. Rather than insulting the Mario devs, (who, as you note, are building a ground-breaking game on a deadline) he's making a joke about how obsessive someone would have to be to dig deep into a 26-year-old game's codebase and hardware internals in order to get acceptable performance on a mod that does things to the game engine that the devs had no intention of implementing.

Thanks for providing more context for what's going on - all of this stuff is neato.