Ehh, your phrasing was dangerously close to the "how many is too many" political rhetoric that typically connotes not only the existence of a moral boundary but

Ehh, your phrasing was dangerously close to the "how many is too many" political rhetoric that typically connotes not only the existence of a moral boundary but having already crossed the boundary and caused significant damage. That's what set people off, not "a whiff of anything short of pure adoration." A small change, like tweaking the phrasing to "is there a limit?," would have avoided the landmine and signaled that you were looking for a good faith engineering discussion rather than political headbutting.