The people here who demanded proof should have known that it could not have been shared, and thus should have taken the statements into consideration and politely simply agreed to disagree or even just walked away knowing that the impressions could be taken with a bit of salt.
Instead, attacks were made against a person's credibility in bad faith and essentially the discussion was "AcKshUALly"'d into an argument where they could do their best to walk away with the hypothesis of "J-20 being at least equal to F-22" intact even if it came at the cost of alienating one of the most high yield and informative users this forum has seen in half a decade.
Perhaps the worst thing to come out of this, is the demonstrable inability of some people to read the room and read the cues.
Not every hill needs to be contested, not every inch needs to be fought over, good grief.
While his quit is an unfortunate loss, I take the incident as mistakes of patchwork_chimera himself more than anyone else. Others do not have to cuddle him (but read on). If his possession of certain knowledge cannot be disclosed in public, he should watch his own mouth in places where most go by pseudo names. It is really up to himself to know when to disengage. This saying of "Not every inch needs to be fought over" applies to all, him included.
Even if he does have the authority on certain things because of his professional work, no one has to take every word of him on the face value. Authority does not equal to credibility. People make mistakes. People lie. Had he joined the forum longer and with more quality posts that have been verified by time, he might have been able to build up the credibility to fence off the skepticism from the beginning.
In the age of information war, it is expected that your audience will be skeptical of what you are saying. They will question and challenge you if they do not believe your claims no matter who you are. We have seen too many false claims backed up only by "trust me bro". It's just a natural reaction for people to challenge yet another "trust me bro" when they can. I would not call such challenge as attack.
I would not think that anyone was in this debate with bad faith. We cannot really read someone's mind and judge by his intent. As long as no current forum rule was broken, no one should be punished.
Now, if mods need to value certain members more than the rest and want to have different standards for them, please change the forum rules and make them clear. Then we will know that "trust me/him, bro" is good enough for claims coming from such members of higher value. Mods will also know when to intervene firmly before debates can potentially endanger such valuable members.
