My view may be colored by the fact that I'm a raging pragmatist about these sorts of issues who thinks that the right type of solution depends on the project an

My view may be colored by the fact that I'm a raging pragmatist about these sorts of issues who thinks that the right type of solution depends on the project and on the team (i.e. the right solution for mission-critical bank financial transaction processing is likely not also ideal for a high-velocity startup), but my impression was that the idea was for such an axis to be considered as a spectrum, not a simple dividing line for an us-vs-them holy war. When interviewing and considering joining a team, envisioning a spectrum like this allows you to ask questions to see where a potential employer tends to fall on this spectrum, and thus determine whether it seems like a good fit for how you prefer to work and what you want to do. And no, this is certainly not the only axis along which one can plot software development, and I doubt Mr. Yegge's goal was to propose that it was. At most it is an axis, and the goal would be for it to be a useful one when leveraged in the right context. Can people take interesting ideas and horribly abuse them? Well, obviously. One might even argue that an idea that can't be abused by someone so inclined must not be very interesting at all.