I think it's the "can we honestly say" phrasing that got you flamed here. It reads as "those stupid scientists don't know what they're doing".

HN is less hackers than it is pedantic VC lackeys training for their aspirational role as a wealthy-and-opinionated Twitter personality.

Curiosity is one thing, but in practice "just asking questions about dark matter" is uncomfortably close to pseudoscience and a lot of us are sick of it. It's similar to if you had accidentally said something similar to a young-earth creationist.