Considering the context, I think it is perfectly reasonable to lament the choice of wording and no, I will not be deleting my comment because you don't like it. It has a rather higher score than I anticipated, so I didn't react to that wording in a vacuum, now did I?
For someone who hates tangents you're sure good at them.
Sometimes people complain about comments getting downvoted out of disagreement, even though they contribute to the discussion. But I am far more bothered by the inverse problem: comments that get upvoted out of shallow agreement even though they serve no purpose, focusing on some negligibly relevant detail in a haughty way. These comments make it harder to participate in the conversation for fear of people latching on to completely irrelevant details and drowning out the message.
In short: Upvotes correlate with good comments, but they also correlate with certain types of poisonous comment.
As to continuing tangents, I would have been quite happy to see both of our comments dug into invisible gray together. But even if that fails I'm happy to provide a bright warning against being reactionary, and to hope that any wasted space is meta at worst.
For someone who hates tangents you're sure good at them.