That's mountain climbing elitism. The "great climbers" made it look cool, then others with more money than skill figured out their own way to do it, and had a great time to boot. I'm sure that drives elitists nuts, kind of like how I'm sure software hackers building with Arduino makes EE majors nuts.
A better analogy would be if an software hacker paid for several starving EE students to come build an amazing Arduino project for their child's science fair, then bragged to everyone about how smart their child is.
Alternatively, imagine Larry Ellison paying for a shitload of comp-sci PhD students to comb through The Art of Programming to look for mistakes, only to submit them under his name so he could get his own cheque from Knuth?
Earnest hobbyism and trying to learn new things is awesome and should be strongly encouraged in everyone. Buying your way to the top and cheapening everyone else's experience is crass and a good way be shunned in almost any social setting.
Your examples illustrate someone lying. Merely arriving at the summit of Everest by assisted means does not make one a liar. People do many things - summiting among them - for their own amusement, not to make grandiose claims. Jon Krakauer "bought" (or had it purchased on his behalf) his way to the top of Everest and to my knowledge has not equated himself with Sir Edmund Hillary to date.
If teleportation was invented, would it cheapen the pioneer's accomplishments if we could just buy a ticket to teleport to the top, grab a peek, and teleport home?
I'm a mountain climber. I'm not Everest caliber. It doesn't sound like elitism to me to say that only experienced, skilled, healthy climbers have any business on a deadly mountain, any more than if I said only experienced, skilled, healthy individuals had any business being a test pilot.
It's not elitism that I can't climb this rock or that mountain. It's the simple limit of my abilities. That's the beauty of it, really, because I have the same opportunity as anybody else- get better.
