Put Jaynes on a pedestal, you mean?

Yes. To put it one way, a site search for 'Jaynes' (which will hit other people sometimes discussed on LW, like the Bicameral Mind Jaynes) turns up 718 hits; in contrast, to name some other statisticians or like-minded folks - 'Ioannidis' (which is hard to spell) turns up 89 results, 'Cochrane' 57, 'Fisher' 127, 'Cohen' 193, 'Gelman' 128, 'Shalizi' 109... So apparently in the LW-pantheon-of-statisticians-off-the-top-of-my-head, Jaynes can barely muster a majority (718 vs 703). For someone on a pedestal, he just isn't discussed much.

How many people do you think have read substantial portions of Jaynes book?

Most of those in the book reading clubs fail, he is rarely quoted or cited... <5%.

Have you?

I bought a copy (sitting on my table now, actually), read up to chapter 4, some sections of other chapters that were interesting, and concluded that a number of reviews were correct in claiming it was not the best introduction for a naive non-statistician.

So I've been working through other courses/papers/books and running experiments and doing analyses of my own to learn statistics. I do plan to go back to Jaynes, but only once I have some more learning under my belt - the Probabilistic Graphical Models Coursera is starting today, and I'm going to see if I can handle it, and after that I'm going to look through and pick one of Kruschke's Doing Bayesian Data Analysis, Sivia's Data Analysis: A Bayesian Tutorial, Bolstad's Introduction to Bayesian Statistics, and Albert's Bayesian Computation with R. But we'll see how things actually go.