I don't wish NIST had conducted the proceedings more professionally, not because I'm a nihilist about standards but because I don't know enough to critique how they ran this. I've read the whole post upthread (by the way: if you're scratching your head, the trick is to read the red text, across several pages, all the way through, and then come back and pay attention to the rebuttals you think are interesting) and don't feel any more equipped to say anything about it. What I will say is that a significant chunk of all the world's public key encryption expertise got sunk into this event.

One reason KYBER got standardized quickly is that PQC KEMs are time-sensitive if you believe the quantum attack threat is plausibly material within the next 10-15 years. Your adversary in these attacks will almost certainly be state signals intelligence groups, and the expense involved in building attack hardware dwarfs the expense of collecting traffic today to decrypt in 2034. If you're a PQC believer, you want something out the door soon.

I don't understand the special sway you think Bernstein has, versus all the other cryptographers that participate in NISTPQC, with the OpenSSH team. I worry that people believe stuff like this because they know who Bernstein is and what OpenSSH is, and don't off the top of their head know who Tancrède Lepoint is. Note also that the KYBER team includes Peter Schwabe, whose name you should definitely know if you're a Bernstan.