Alright, I might as well do my usual technique of throwing in one last messy and disjointed post and immediately forcing myself to stop caring about arguing with people on the internet.
Kurabu: Yes, your question was harmless, and yes, I believe your responses were warranted. However, it's hard to give you any more information than what was already given. The vagueness and initial rudeness wasn't anything personal against you. Honestly, the big takeaway from all of this is that at the very least, zeromus isn't intentionally being rude. As much as I hate to say it, the best course of action is to just take his words as they are and ignore the tone of them.
I've said it in a few threads now to a few different people, but the tone of a message shouldn't invalidate any information in said message. You can safely ignore insults and rude words and just take the information out of it. A lot of things can be learned through simple Google searches. Maybe not in this case, where it was explicitly stated there's no documentation for BizHawk's core implementation, but in general you'll probably want to do a bit of Googling before asking things like this.
Like I said in... whatever other thread that was, my PM inbox is open if you're unsure of whether or not you should ask or even post something. I'm not the most knowledgeable person, sure, but I have all the time in the world to be polite and respectful!
zeromus: I have nothing personal against you, and I'll even apologize for actively taking you away from development time. Your second response to Kurabu (the one after his apology) was perfectly fine from my perspective, and you weren't even particularly bad the first times around. I understand the frustration of dealing with people who aren't on your level, but at the same time I still honestly feel like it's just an excuse to not have to be nice to people. Maybe I'm wrong, I'll readily admit I'm wrong about a lot of things.
To everyone: It wouldn't hurt to try to understand the other side. There's a lot that people can learn from Google before taking their questions to programmers, but on the other hand there's a lot of ways that programmers can be polite without wasting too much of their precious time. Here at least, I think that with maybe one Playstation loving exception, all the people here understand and respect the devs enough to work with them on bugs and issues they may have.
If I may be blunt for a moment, time being wasted should never be an issue. No one is wasting anyone's time here. Addressing someone is your choice, and oh no! It's 30 seconds of your life you'll never get back! Maybe you could've just not addressed that person and your precious time would have been saved! I can't possibly say that in a nicer way, so just pretend I wrote a program or something to make it all okay. I understand that as programmers dealing with people using your programs, you sort of have the obligation to respond and try to help them out, but your general attitude about it is horrible. You always make it sound like you don't want to be there and that they're at fault for wasting your time, but... I mean, if I don't think I have the time to address something, I don't address it. People are patient. You don't have to answer them until you have the time to do so. Especially in the case of this thread, which isn't dealing with a problem at all.
Fractal et al.: I still really don't think it should be defended, per se. To me, solarplex's first post was perfect in that regard: Addressing and admitting that it could have been better worded, but still focusing on the helpful information within.
Anyone who understands the plight of a programmer could easily and thoughtfully explain the situation. The thread has honestly just seemed like people ganging up on Kurabu for no good reason. Someone could have explained what was going on instead of continuing to blame Kurabu for doing everything wrong when he had no idea he was even doing anything wrong in the first place. I guess that this was addressed on IRC, though I have no idea how that went.
Saying the devs "have the right" to be rude to people for any reason is disgraceful. Even the catb article doesn't stoop to that level of disrespect. From what I skimmed in that article, it was mostly saying the same things that have been said in this thread more recently, that programmers don't intend to be rude or disrespectful for the most part, they're just being blunt and concise to try to deal with peoples' problems as quickly and painlessly as possible. I will agree that the devs have the right to be rude to anyone who is being rude to them in turn, but that's because I think everyone should have that right.
No one should have the inherent right to be a douchebag to anyone they please for any reason they so choose, no one should actively defend that douchebaggery, and most of all, no one should fucking gang up on someone who's feeling bullied. Even if you don't think there's any bullying, you just don't do that. We're not in elementary school anymore, there's no need to be so childish.
And speaking of childish, that leads me to my last statement.
natt: Fuck off, and stop wasting everyone's time.
