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If there's some other way of justifying that opinion, I'd love to hear it.If you wanted to hear it, you could just read it as it's been stated repeatedly ITT and it's in the HN Guidelines #1:
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
One of the unironically hardest things about maintaining a community is Saying No. And I'm not just speaking abstractly here, I'm talking personally. When you have a community of interesting and intelligent people who you've enjoyed discussing things with, it's completely natural to start to want to bring everything there for discussion. But some topics inspire far more substantial discussion than others. Some topics are inherently meaty, in particular when they are about things that we, individually or in our direct organizations, can directly take action on, extent further, or otherwise make use of in our lives/work. That helps ground discussion in reality vs emotion and subjective infinities. Other topics risk being more and more intellectual empty calories, where many words can be written that have no actual use of any kind, pure jawboning and ever more self-referential spirals. This is particularly risky for something like this, which is a level removed from hard reports due to lack of hard proof which in turn naturally results in much of the discussion going one or more levels more meta: rather than even discussing the impacts, however useless it might be, it's discussing the report, the author of the report, their credibility etc.
It's not that it's inherently wrong to have those discussions, but does it need to be here? The answer to a lot of us is no. Even if we want to discuss it very much. Self-discipline (and community enforced discipline, and moderator enforced ultimately) is key to maintaining a place like this, and that includes erring towards not having low quality, highly meta and vacuous discussions with no ability for anyone in the community to do any grounding or contribute anything you couldn't read in a newspaper.
I can take issue with some of the other stuff you wrote, but ultimately it comes down to that. Maintaining good communities often involves picking areas and sticking to them, generalization being death. If this was a forum devoted exclusively to space habitats and cats, someone taking out pipelines would still be very important, but it would be neither space habitats, nor cats. It would be completely reasonable for the community to flag it dead. That's not a judgement on the topic nor discussion of it in general. It's just not space habitats or cats.