Then somebody replied with
"Somebody", huh? Yeah I said that, and I stand by it. Here's why.
There's nothing wrong with healthy discernment, or constructive critique on certain claims. But if you actually look at the meta across the forum, you will see a certain hostility directed towards, say, Spencer or other members of the Xbox team, that is not directed towards Mark Cerny. I don't have the time to pull up examples but if you frequent the boards regularly enough you will have seen what I refer to here.
And if you think by some chance that doesn't play into a noticeable trend where a majority of posters take Sony/Cerny technical claims at face value and speculate on how those are being achieved (as in having the fundamental belief that they ARE being accomplished as stated), but are rather dismissive of MS technical claims at face value and speculate mainly in ways to try disproving what they claim as being true or possible, then you might need to take the head out of the proverbial sand.
It's that general flow of discourse and the tone that comes with it I meant when I said the quote, and I've had enough time across multiple threads with multiple users to notice that. There's nothing wrong in stating a fact, and if the only attempt to assume I'm wrong on this is to ask me to pull up literal examples, there's zero chance I'm searching through upwards thousands of posts for literal days to put up those kind of quotes for something of this type of discussion. I simply got better things to do with my time than that.
Simple as this: if the person who on average is discussing technical features regarding XSX, they find themselves usually on the defensive with the majority of their claims or interpretations. I don't mean "defensive" as in rather typical constructive questioning or discussion, which is normal. No, I mean "defensive" as in they will generally have to deal with a group of rather focused posters who will continuously shoot down claims, move goalposts, dismiss evidence provided, draw up random conjecture, try completely shifting the topic to tangentially related branch topics (that nonetheless don't follow discussion of the thread's main topic), etc.
And it's usually done in a way to wear down through attrition, to tire the other side out of any discussion. I notice that those more willing to put those discussing MS/XSX technical-related aspects (particularly anything regarding SSD I/O) in good-faith speculative terms, generally come in one after the other after a decent bit of time, and you can clearly notice the tonal shift in the general thread discussion. This very thread is perfect evidence of it. Of importance is that these sorts that come in a bit later to shift the tone of discussion, they generally don't seem very interested in having a genuine discussion (as in willingness to cede some of their own thoughts on the topic and see if a middle ground of understanding can be met). They appear more interested in setting their own talking points as the baseline and not really willing to cede any ground of thought for any sort of compromise.
Now again, this isn't exclusive to only ardent Sony people; MS/XSX-partial folks do it too. However, since there are so many more of the former than the latter, you are simply going to see more of the former than the latter. And that's certainly what I've observed, especially of late. Granted not everyone who discusses in a more optimistic fashion regards one system or the other is suddenly a fanboy for that platform, that's not what I'm suggesting.
However you don't need to be a fanboy in order to have a strong bias or preference for a given brand, either. It's even possible to have a strong preference for both brands, but depending on the topic in question others may perceive as a fanboy for one brand without noticing you've shown similar strong preference for the other brand in other discussions, and a lot of the time actual fanboys (who make a lot of those type of accusations) will selectively tune out a person's balanced perspectives to focus on a perspective they have on a brand they don't prefer, to label said person as a fanboy of said brand. Happens all the time online, here and abroad.