>people are confused as to why this frankly somewhat amateurish project is currently at the top of HN.

Probably the GP's irritation comes from the same place as mine: needlessly abrasive remarks instead of encouragement and constructive criticism that a community like this should provide.

And why do people care so much that this is at the top of HN, as opposed to the bottom?

>I think you'd expect something that's cleverly using Angular to pull in data dynamically from disparate sources and plotting pretty charts from it,

That part is relatively easy to add, given the nice template this provides. Really, for me, creating this kind of layout is the time-consuming part. Pulling in data from some REST api is a relatively quick task.