> It was certainly in the documentation, [...] in the startup logs, and in the README for quite a long time.
All the wrong places, as already stated. These are not the places where developers actually look. I provided some better example locations here: https://twitter.com/joepie91/status/622920351731843072
> [...] in the blog posts [...]
Certainly not there. Go look around for MongoDB tutorials from the timespan where unacknowledged writes were the default, and almost none of them remark on the 32-bits limitation.
> If you missed it, it's probably because you weren't paying attention.
Nonsense. It simply wasn't in the locations where people actually look. You can easily verify that using the Wayback Machine (and in fact, this is still mostly the case today).
> Again, there are plenty of good reasons to dislike MongoDB, but this isn't one of them, and harping on it substantially degrades your credibility.
If pointing out extremely dangerous past negligence from the MongoDB developers "degrades my credibility" in your view, then you have some very strange ways to determine credibility.