My point is, it's kind of tricky to declare an action "worse than worthless" without having very detailed information about all of the actors involved.

A fair point. Note, though, that my opponent said that his aesthetic preference was "useless but not actually harmful." This post is intended to show how such preferences can, in fact, be harmful rather than merely useless.

It is certainly possible that someone would care more about aesthetics than about winning and be willing to accept that tradeoff-- but in this case, the fact that it even was a tradeoff went unrecognized.