"He didn't fully understand or appreciate the quote about premature optimization, so no one did."

He ain't wrong though.... most people definitely don't get the jive for sure. Knuth was talking about a massively different kind of optimisation than what we do today yet people keep continuing to parrot the 97% figure uncritically like as it was some gospel. [0]

[0] http://www.joshbarczak.com/blog/?p=580