This seems like a good way to read it to me. Hawking does put forth some meaningful arguments in there that deserve attention (or else it wouldn't be worth list

This seems like a good way to read it to me. Hawking does put forth some meaningful arguments in there that deserve attention (or else it wouldn't be worth listening, even if this is Hawking), but he hasn't proven any new theorems or shown an explicit counterexample to previously accepted physics. This firewall issue is just complicated, and it has stubbornly resisted consensus from the physics community despite a year or so of intense interest. I think we're in the market for crazy new ideas at this point.