"why does he have to open with, essentially, 'The people who are actually getting things done and most excited about my platform are doing things wrong. I'm going to tell them they're doing things wrong"
He's acknowledging that these people had to do things wrong, at least in the sense that they had climb a steep learning curve and deploy a heavyweight system, because they basically had no other choice. He's describing the gap that he saw that motivated what he demonstrated. Those artists aren't going to be offended that he attacked their deep love of Unity, they're going to be happy that they have an alternative that suits their needs.
We differ in what we think is "wrong." I would say that your definition of wrong is the least interesting to the people who are currently using Oculus with e.g., Unity. They don't really care about the same things you do.
> had climb a steep learning curve
It's not that steep. I mean, they're not hardcore engineering types, and they figured it out right?
> and deploy a heavyweight system
Is it that heavyweight? Does anyone really care that it's a 16 MB executable? Did that get in the way of anything other than the App Store's arbitrary 50 MB limit? Does performance really matter when you're drawing a panorama?
Define heavyweight. For many people, opening a command line is heavyweight. You're not appreciating how nice Unity is.
> they're going to be happy that they have an alternative that suits their needs.
Time will tell. The history of art tooling is complicated. Maya nee PowerAnimator has been around since 1990. Pixar, which thought it had a better way of doing things with an alternative universe of tools, uses it now too. Photoshop, MediaComposer, Flash, Unity... Everything has its own history and its own outcomes.
I don't know if any of us are equipped to predict what is the right way to develop for the platform. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying he's being kind of a jerk and has a condescending attitude towards people who are actually delivering things with Oculus.
Unity is a terrible solution for things like photo spheres and media tours:
* you can't load it without a long unity splash screen without paying $3K for a pro license
* it renders photospheres poorly - no dynamic eye buffer resolution or separate overlay compositor support
* based on your overall attitude/taking offense, I'm going to assume you haven't actually used Unity at all. Try to HTTP stream/lazy load web assets, go ahead. Also go ahead and try to build links in Unity, or to load JSON. (Hint, none of those are available out of the box). Now try to make changes/iterate, or distributing your changes to clients. Unity is a huge pita.
Honestly, I can't understand why you are arguing online about what's "wrong" or not about something you obviously haven't tried and know nothing about. Now, that's offensive.
What is meant by "wrong" here is "this is more work than it should be to accomplish the desired result...so let's create some infrastructure to make these types of things simpler"
He's acknowledging that these people had to do things wrong, at least in the sense that they had climb a steep learning curve and deploy a heavyweight system, because they basically had no other choice. He's describing the gap that he saw that motivated what he demonstrated. Those artists aren't going to be offended that he attacked their deep love of Unity, they're going to be happy that they have an alternative that suits their needs.