So your point is that people who voluntarily it tend to have a less favorable opinion? That is not exactly surprising. Not to say your priorities aren't right for you, but I don't see the larger point here beyond "I prefer different things!"
As I said at the outset, it's an off-topic rant about how Growl by default enables every application that wants to annoy me, to annoy me. It's a two-line, two-point HN comment, not my magnum opus. The "larger point" is pretty banal: I want to use Growl for some things, but I don't want Growl to, by default, spam me with every possible notification it can, while providing no easy way to change this default so I continue to be surprised by innocuous-seeming applications that I install. (If you're ever designing software that does something similar, think about whether you have users like me and how to accomodate them. That's as large as the point gets.)
