I have no reason to disagree with you on this point, but then again if you thought that my argument was "people should plan for/analyze/understand everything before doing something", then you were reading things that simply weren't there.
Again, I don't disagree, but I think you must be fundamentally misunderstanding the point of the thread itself, which is to say that it had no real point, or that it had many different points that may or may not be contradictory. There was no explicit established goal other than to explore, literally, what gameplay mechanics have and have not been created since 2007. There doesn't need to be a stopping point here, there was no established intent to be "productive" or to be "unproductive", it was simply the start to a conversation that intentionally had no end.
Under what metric? Is proving a negative not important when, say, trying to help someone that's in denial? What about people that don't know any better? I'm certain that if we tried we could come up with plenty of situations where proving a negative can be a productive activity.
I can agree with this, but…
If you had actually read what I said and understood it, you'd know that my argument was that we *make* value. Saying that there is no *intrinsic value* to anything and then following it up with *but we can make value in anything* is not contradictory, it's just establishing that we make our own meanings for existence. Using ad hominem when you don't even comprehend the argument in the first place *is* a fallacy, asswipe. (←- now THAT'S some pointless ad hominem!)
This simply does not follow. Did you even read what you were typing before posting it? Here, let me put these two thoughts together properly so that you can understand them:
"I hope there hasn't been stagnation for the last 9 years. If there has been stagnation, then bringing attention to it can hopefully be a powerful motivator for people to make change."
I challenge you, please, to demonstrate how this argument is illogical.
If you're talking about the guy I originally responded to (i.e. not you), I didn't call him an asshat, I called him a shitposter, and I did so because he came in here to shitpost about how this thread is "completely pointless" if people aren't shitting out brand new game ideas and that everyone is just here to circlejerk about the industry being dead (which, if you actually read the thread, is only partially true).
If you're talking about me calling you an asshat, that's simply because you've just been sitting here arguing about the thread itself instead of actually participating in the topic of the thread. A slightly more productive form of shitposting, but shitposting none-the-less.
It's okay to be wrong, dude, just move on.