<i>(speaking as a journalist, it makes me unlikely to cover them because good products &amp; marketing stunts aren’t always close friends)</i>

What a perfect illustration of the issue at hand: at some point you made a decision not to pay attention to marketing stunts as an indicator of good products, which means that you will undoubtedly miss some good products that happened to use techniques you interpret as marketing stunts. Fair enough? 

Now, replace "marketing stunt" with IE in your example, and websites for "products," and you'll understand where web developers are coming from. Historically, websites and IE aren't always close friends.