HN seems to focus a lot on execution. I want to say that I think it would have been better received if they had just taken the wikipedia full content download, taken a small subset of the data and actually just built the redesign as a live site with all of their proposed features. Then we could have just tried the original, the new, and see what really did or didn't work. As a side benefit, the designers themselves while doing this would also have made lots of adjustments going through this process and probably would have fended off a lot of the caustic comments.

Plus, if they actually had access to coders who could take a full image of wikipedia, div it up and refactor it to a db, then wpredesigned.com could actually run as a real site, with hourly updates from wikipedia merged in automatically.