If you’d rather not, you go your way and I will go mine.
What I was saying was, if you remove the author's identity from the document and just look at the actual words on the paper, you find that the words on the paper have a pretty clear value judgment embedded in them: that "a single consultant serving local businesses in Schaumburg, Illinois" is by definition someone who doesn't care about beautiful code, quality engineering, etc. A beyond-saving rube, in other words.
If a warehouse full of monkeys produced the same argument in the same words, I'd have reacted to it just as strongly. Elitism is a turn-off for me.
All I’m saying is that once I decide to read it, I try to let go of that and take the article on its own merits. It could be that an idiot has written something interesting. Or the reverse, a well-repsected person is just plain wrong today.
(And in reality, I’m just as prone as the next guy to think about the author. This business of being detached and zen-like is me aspiring to read essays at a high level on the hierarchy!)
I find that people are much more likely to perceive value judgments and look for hidden meanings in things when they are feeling insecure. Did that guy just insult me? Is he trying to imply that I don't move the industry forward? How dare he?!
Unfortunately, this is a world constrained by time and by knowledge. I do not have the time or expertise to evaluate everything I read in a clinical fashion.
Given those constraints, who the author is becomes a very powerful signal. If Neil De Grasse Tyson says something about astrophysics I can probably take it at face value, at least until I have a reason to question. On the other hand, someone with a self-interested reason to get me to believe something will rightly get far more scrutiny, even if they are eventually proven completely right.
I'm not saying this article does have ulterior motives, just that acting as if every article has no author and hence no motive behind its writing is naive.