The comments weren't awful. It was really a bad judgement call because it violated the principle "don't be disruptive to make a point", which I really didn't consider very clearly before doing it.

The reason I was annoyed about it was because signatures are the way you see who is saying something in a conversation thread. Back then you'd click on the person's username and get easy access to their pages, talk page, block links, contributions, etc. it also made it really hard to see what they had contributed. I was also concerned that someone would go what I in essence did - which was a really dumb move on my part, like I say.