I think the proposed changes were a bad idea for political reasons, and arguably for technical reasons as well, but the controversity for the internet at large

I think the proposed changes were a bad idea for political reasons, and arguably for technical reasons as well, but the controversity for the internet at large seems to stem from an insinuation that the changes were done to make it possible for the NSA to break SHA-3, and I suspect that is why this was submitted to HN. In that sense I think this is overblown. I don't think anyone thinks NSA has a preimage attack that works for 256 bits capacity but not 512 bits. This is an argument over performance vs. future-proofing that should be fairly boring to non-cryptographers.