RPG partisanship leads to reading incomprehension

I'm amazed at the knee jerk reactions some people will do when some of the fundamentals of the RPG rules they love get questioned. To the point they'll read what they want to read and respond accordingly oblivious to the actual content of the blog post.

Yesterday I wrote up a small post touching on the effectiveness of a sword vs full plate and how, given the ineffectiveness of a sword swing, those combats usually boiled down to grabbing, pinning and killing with a dagger or with a blade pushed through the softer spots. My point was that wrestling and grappling played a key element in such combats and that the game rules were "divorced" when it came to such cases.

I got all sorts of responses. None of which were pleasant. Most addressed my "lack of imagination". Others asked if I had never done a fight without weapons. Who the fuck was talking about fighting without a weapon? Sword vs sword in full plate is hardly unarmed combat. I was addressing the lack of leverage the character's wrestling and grappling skills had when fighting WITH a sword against full plate.

Why does this reading incomprehension exist and what's its impact? I'm troubled that this leads to a lack of progress in the game development arena. When someone raises a hand a points out that some modifiers would be better applied somewhere else and gets hammered with arguments against something that is not the actual text of the post then idea exchange and improvement in the game gets hampered.

Is this caused by rules heavy games? A "don't rock the boat" syndrome when players don't want their rules questioned because it would break too many things and lead to a new learning curve?

Have you suffered this? What do you think?