Just need to stretch my brain in that direction, it's been too long.
There's nothing wrong with having taste, and having some things that appeal to you and some that do not.
Of course, when people gather to honor things you dislike it is polite to quietly walk away. It is generally rude to interfere with their fun, unless innocent kittens are being injured or there's some other extenuating circumstance.
Respectfully, and notably like myself, I can't see comparable contributions from Steve Abatangle. I looked. Maybe I missed them; if so, I'm sorry.
If I didn't, though, let me suggest that you be more cautious about attributing "hissy fits" to people who clearly bent over backwards to help other people, just because they removed their own web pages without warning you first.
I'm not asking because I want to know–it just seems odd in this day and age that someone actually could remain anonymous (especially someone in technology circles).
Still, it would be a shame if his contributions were forgotten. The link in the article preserves about all of it: http://viewsourcecode.org/why/
http://www.rubyinside.com/nokogiri-ruby-html-parser-and-xml-...
(_why wrote Hpricot. Imagine how that post must've felt from his perspective.)
His conclusion was that if you wanted your code to last, you had to write games, since people make huge efforts to preserve them through time (emulation, etc...).