I love a lot of what he says, but a few things really frustrate me.

The great thing about people who try to "productize" their ideas, is that they have to confront all the embarrassing situations where their approach really doesn't work that well, because they have actual users they are responsible to.

If you don't want to do that, I think your influence can be directly negative: When other people try to step into that position, they will end up having to defend why they are screwing up a simple, beautiful idea, which is what invariably happens when theory meets reality.

I don't think this is a small problem; just in the talk and in the corresponding article, Bret himself will gladly insult the people who created the tools available today, for no other reason than not offering general solutions to support interactive development. And he does this without giving any indication that general solutions might exist. Competing for mind-share with something that doesn't have to actually exist can be pretty hard.

The honest truth is that the kinds of interactive tooling that Bret wants might be an "essential complexity" in the sense used in "No Silver Bullet": The tools will have to be handcrafted from situation to situation, with little potential for reuse. And in some cases, that tooling will probably be far more work than the nature of the problem requires. To paraphrase the classic warning about overuse of regular expressions:

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll create an interactive model of the abstractions that could be involved." Now they have a far, far greater problem.

I'm going to stop before I get into his description of people who "simulate computers in their head", because this is already starting to sound more negative than I want it to. I really did love both the talk and the article. But I feel Bret is going completely counter to the principles he described in the second half of the talk. Often the real moral choice is to be just another boring implementer.

I was disappointed by the lack of practicality in a lot of the presentation. In some ways there was more flash the substance. The ghost image/time rewind isn't realistic for any real game development. The movie making ipad app was a neat toy but totally impractical in a professional environment.

That said it was a great presentation because showing that flash gets the brain gears turning on realistic ways to increase iteration times.

Maybe it was an outlier, but a friend had a visceral reaction against the design aesthetics of his demos and thought the principle examples he gave were depressing. Overall, since I've evangelized in my humble ways the message from the talk, I've learned that not everyone believes that a principle based approach is the ideal path. Some are interested in solving hard problems for the sake of solving them, and others are interested in making lots of money. Nothing inherently wrong with either, but still a bit surprising for some reason.