I don't tend to agree that contrarian / negative information is typically very useful as an indicator of the quality of a given piece of tech. There's no shortage of "Foo sucks" or "disadvantages of Foo" available for literally any value of Foo, and I rarely find them to be very useful; they generally feel like they're either written by someone who doesn't understand Foo very well, or who is evangelizing in favor of competitor product Bar. (Or, typically, both at once.)
I do of course agree that any product's inventors can be expected to be biased in favor of that product, and that pro-Foo material in itself is not a suitable sole source of information about Foo... which is why I said I weight so heavily in favor of products where the developers "acknowledge points where the competitor might have the advantage," and (in a different subthread) that I'm "assessing the quality of the tech based on the humility of the tech's inventors". It's also why I spend time looking at stackoverflow Q&A (watching people wrestle with their actual problems with a framework is much more illuminating than reading their rants about it afterwards.)
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OK, thanks for clarifying.
I don't tend to agree that contrarian / negative information is typically very useful as an indicator of the quality of a given piece of tech. There's no shortage of "Foo sucks" or "disadvantages of Foo" available for literally any value of Foo, and I rarely find them to be very useful; they generally feel like they're either written by someone who doesn't understand Foo very well, or who is evangelizing in favor of competitor product Bar. (Or, typically, both at once.)
I do of course agree that any product's inventors can be expected to be biased in favor of that product, and that pro-Foo material in itself is not a suitable sole source of information about Foo... which is why I said I weight so heavily in favor of products where the developers "acknowledge points where the competitor might have the advantage," and (in a different subthread) that I'm "assessing the quality of the tech based on the humility of the tech's inventors". It's also why I spend time looking at stackoverflow Q&A (watching people wrestle with their actual problems with a framework is much more illuminating than reading their rants about it afterwards.)