Intent is a funny thing—people usually assume that good intent is sufficient because it's obvious to themselves, but the rest of us don't have access to that state, so has to be encoded somehow in your actual comment in order to get communicated. I sometimes put it this way: the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I take your point at least halfway though, because it wasn't the worst violation of the guidelines. (Usually I say "this is not a borderline case" but this time it was!) I'm sensitive to regional flamewar because it's tedious and, unlike national flamewar or religious flamewar, it tends to sneak up on people (i.e. we don't realize we're doing it).