Bludgeon? I hope not. I try not to be personally critical.
It's true that "middlebrow" is pejorative. We should find a neutral term. I'm thinking "generic dismissal", but if anyone has a suggestion I'd like to hear it.
> without having to actually address their arguments
I think there's a misunderstanding here that goes back to the nature of generic dismissals. "Addressing arguments" does not always raise the signal/noise level.
That particular comment's argument was that there is no value in getting people to use a free product. That claim isn't just generic, it's trivially false: if a product had no value, no one would use it. The trouble with generic dismissals is that "addressing their arguments" usually makes the discussion worse, not better. "Free products can too have value" isn't headed anywhere substantive or on-topic.
Moreover, once a discussion has gone completely generic—the semantic heat death of internet threads—any such response will produce several more such replies. Why? Because everybody has an opinion about the generic thing. This is how low-substance discussions proliferate.
By contrast, we can't all have an opinion about agricultural software, because we're mostly aware that we know squat about it. Had that comment read (say), "I've worked in the farm space and we've found that it's easy to get farmers to adopt new software but hard to get them to pay for it, so 15% of the market doesn't mean much," that might or might not have been a good comment, or a true one, but it wouldn't have been a generic dismissal. That's why programminggeek's follow-up comment was much better.