No need for apologies! My comment was intended in the spirit of good-natured debate. While I disagree with your views on the Series S question, I welcome your article in its providing a venue for interesting discussion. In short: regarding the arguments you put forward, I have many criticisms; regarding your publishing the opinion piece, I have only praise.
Reiterating my earlier post, I think the argument in favour of the Series S (XSS) boils down to the following claims:
- weak hardware results in developmental innovations
- those innovations are better than what would have been achieved otherwise
I agree with the first point, and I disagree with the second. If you study chess all day, you might accidentally get better at maths. But, if you want to get better at maths, it is better to study maths, not chess. Likewise, working on the XSS port might result in occasional innovations that benefit XSX players. But, those are the exception. I think devs know what they are doing, and thus, if you want them to improve X, then you should want them to work on X.
Suppose you wanted to continue to claim that the Series S has a net positive effect on Series X gamers. Based on my reasoning above, I don't think the argument from development innovation is viable. But, perhaps there are other ways to defend the view that the Series S benefits Series X owners. For example, you could argue that even though Xbox has a smaller install-base than PlayStation this generation, things would have been far worse if not for the Series S. And the smaller the install-base for a platform, the less incentive devs have to port to that platform. Perhaps, when PlayStation announces its "pro" console, Xbox could retaliate not with its own upgraded console, but by slashing the price of the Series S, hoping to argue that there are more customers to be gained at the low end of the market.