Obviously creating something will usually be more difficult than critiquing that something.
"creating versus critiquing" is different from criticism and praise. Aside from the more obvious reasons, criticism is more useful/important than praise on a forum like this because praise often doesn't get questioned; you can say "this game it the best" without explaining how without catching flack. People often get defensive of games they like when they see criticism no matter how valid that criticism may be, therefore people who aren't just trying to rile people up with avoid one-off "this game sucks" type posts.
For a while, Derrick was what his detractors thought him to be. I remember him often posting opinions as if they were fact — or commonly accepted as truth — in abrasive ways. Even the few times I agreed with what he had to say, it seemed as if he didn't want to go through the trouble of explaining his stance, so his posts were of the "this game sucks" type.
I remember him getting banned some time after that and upon his return, he actually started explaining what he meant when he said "this game sucks." I think he made a thread about Hitman: Absolution where he just plainly laid out how the game worked and the ways it went against the main draws of the series. That type of feedback could be immensely useful for developers, especially if they're doing something that compromises the point of their game. Derrick went on to post like this for a while and even when I'd disagree about a particular game "sucking" I could see how someone could feel that way about it by reading one of his posts.
Every so often, I see another of his posts and noticed them getting progressively closer to how I remember them being when I first joined. You can't excuse lazily bashing games with saying why, but I completely understand how someone would slack off in that regard. That The Last of Us thread is a prime example. A completely sound attempt at criticism of a game — not necessarily airtight, or without any flaws, but reasonable, with some backup — is presented and a flood of drive-by, one-off, empty attacks comes pouring in. When you go against what's popular, the majority, the status quo, Etc. you'll often have to sift through a bunch of crap involving attacks on your very right to say whatever it is that you're saying. Like, you have to defend the fact that you can say "this is bad," before even being able to discuss the validity of your actual initial statement. so I get, even if resorting to "this sucks BYE" isn't excusable.
I was never his friend and I never really liked him, but I considerably appreciated what he saw. I could count on him to at least address the failings of the industry and to point out what many would consider harmful trends/habits in regards to game design from a consumer perspective, stuff designers might not realize were bad, or stuff they would never willingly put in their games if they had any other choice. That's one less person I can count on to do that here.
