This seems to me a very inaccurate and unfair characterization, especially the insinuation that he's dishonestly suppressing his newfound belief in D-Wave becau

This seems to me a very inaccurate and unfair characterization, especially the insinuation that he's dishonestly suppressing his newfound belief in D-Wave because he's a "professional skeptic". Aaronson is clearly still unconvinced that D-Wave's machine actually does anything "sufficiently quantum" to get any speedup over what you can do classically. He says: D-Wave does have something today that’s more computationally-useful than a roast-beef sandwich; the question is “merely” whether it’s ever more useful than your laptop. and: It remains true, as I’ve reiterated here for years, that we have no direct evidence that quantum coherence is playing a role in the observed speedup, or indeed that entanglement between qubits is ever present in the system. On the other hand, he is willing to say that D-Wave have indeed made a machine that does Something Interesting, namely giving approximate solutions to a particular mathematical problem. So it looks to me as if he (1) has changed his mind about the things he's been given actual evidence for, (2) is perfectly willing to say so despite his role "as a professional skeptic", and (3) hasn't so far been convinced that D-Wave have an actual useful quantum computer doing quantum-computer things that you couldn't do just as well with a classical machine. Which is approximately the exact opposite of what you say.