you would consider the mug-smashing incident as whinning

Absolutely not. There it was someone who was a well-respected member of the Perl community and who took it upon himself to shake people out of the complacency into which he felt they had fallen. He went to a room full of Perl luminaries and had the self-confidence to challenge the view of everyone in the room with very strong words (from what I've heard, I wasn't there). He succeeded in shaking things up and we all owe him.

This case bears no resemblance at all to someone anonymously posting an apparently badly informed and poorly worded whine on an Internet forum. To affect change you first have to invest something of yourself. You don't seem prepared to invest anything except a few self-aggrandizing views. Argh, why am I even still responding...