Did I insult someone? If so, please identify it for me, because in review I do not believe that I did. I would like to track that down and figure out how to stop making that mistake.
I think people are overreacting to my vocabulary and general style, rather than any particular insults, partially because no one is pointing at anything specific that I said. I presented the complaint, identified the author's intent as valid with only the specific nature of his choice as flawed, demonstrated that I was only asking for what I and others already do, which implied this was only a lesson that I and others had probably needed to learn, too.
But correcting mistakes always requires acknowledging a mistake first, and that inevitably hits the ego. A professional writer seeks a professional editor because he knows he has flaws, and needs an expert to help identify them. We are not paralleling that situation here. I was trying to identify an error the author neither wanted nor expected to be identified, because if he understood the nature of the confusion he caused, he would know not to make the mistake in the first place. In my experience, achieving that has never been possible without a heavy hit to the ego, meaning most people will not take the feedback as intended (no matter how it is worded), and would rather take it as an attempt by me to injure their ego for my own selfish reasons. In this way, they can ignore the complaint and protect their own ego, by failing to acknowledge any mistake. The environment you are discussing has an expectation of professional response to well-meaning feedback. Forums do not have a requirement for a professional response.
While the immediate response is contrary, the author will typically incorporate the solution anyway. And that is why I bother.