People who don't understand that excel is just a tool, which is useful but has flaws, arguing with people who don't understand that experts care about solutions not the tools, in which case it might be ok to compromise something unimportant, like the _name_ of something.
What these two sides have in common is the contempt for the actual experts for not building a tool that HN could build but wouldn't know how to use.
Peak HN.
EDIT: Also, i'm not a biologist, but I see the same phenomenon in finance where a bunch of low pay webdevs nobodies refuse to make an effort to understand why Excel is popular, push their half backed solutions, and then are confused that nobody uses them, and frustrated when showed for the 10th time the feature set, that they don't really have the attention to detail to implement. Then i come on HN and realize "oh so _this_ is where these people come from".
If you want to sound reasonable, at least try to hide your contempt.
Better luck next time.