My estimate of the general intelligence of the subset of LWers who replied to this post has gone way down.

It seems like it's your estimate of the programming knowledge of the commenters that should go down. Most of the proposed solutions have in common that they sound really simple to implement, but would in fact be complicated - which someone with high general intelligence and rationality, but limited domain-specific knowledge, might not know.

Should people who can't program refrain from suggesting programming fixes? Maybe. But maybe it's worth the time to reply to some of the highly-rated suggestions and explain why they're much harder than they look.

(I agree with your proposed solution to attempt simplifications.)