However, to me Soylent feels as if a bunch of business experts with no software experience sat down to have a detailed debate with an open internet forum about what design decisions should be made in the construction of an electronic banking system or FEA modeling software, the whole way using only Wikipedia as a resource and without consulting anyone with past experience building such a system.
Actually, Soylent's development process reminds me a bit of many Bitcoin products: overconfident hype-prone attempts to design high-value systems with limited domain knowledge and a certain disdain for regulation, authority, and expertise.
If I weren't opposed to giving them money I certainly wouldn't be opposed to trying Soylent and perhaps using it as a meal-replacement shake at times. After all, the stuff is almost certainly more nutritionally valuable than a lot of the things I eat. But as a complete meal replacement, I feel things need to be pretty damn right and I don't think Soylent have the domain experience or testing to market their product as such.
What do you mean? That is the whole point of the discussion. They are citing studies and talking about what effect the various ingredients in the formula will have on the body.
Were you expecting a magical revelation from the gods of nutrition?
Unlike subjective ad-hoc-cy garbage like web/js frameworks, nutrition is a sound science well studied for hundreds of years. We know which people in which climes eat which food groups in what proportion, how they fare relative to each other, impact of food groups on your bile/blood/bowels , ... There are, as you choose to call them, "gods of nutrition", with PhDs and years of experience studying the damn thing in their labs. To randomly pick brown rice over whey because "hey I don't want to support industrialized cattle farmers"...that would be like my toddler picking candy over broccoli because it just tastes better! This is supposed to be an MRP that real people eat, and hopefully has no adverse effects on them. Its not some random 8080 server that serves json whether you code it up with or without semicolons.