Has Design Criticism Gone Soft?

Elizabeth Goodspeed, U.S. editor-at-large for It’s Nice That, acknowledges she’s a “hater”; accepts she “picked a bad time to become a critic”; and laments how anything but the most sunny of praise on other designers’ work is frowned upon in today’s current state of design criticism/critique and its negative effective on it: “When the balance of discourse leans too far towards praise, genuine critique becomes identified as harsh”. The design criticism of the late 1990s and early 2000s was brutal… it would definitely not fly in this age of extreme sensibility.