I don't think anyone has accused him of stealing coins directly from peoples wallets. But some do call him a thief. A thief takes property that belongs to someone else. He is not doing that. He has taken a flaw in the Magi client and basically used it to build himself a better miner. Maybe not 100% fair, but certainly not theft. I actually respect his effort. And I'll respect the developer's effort to patch the flaw.
That 23.5 is an average over 28 days, some days it's under 1, 1 day it was over 160! No tricks here, just solo mining at 1Mh. Software is XMGpoolminerWin64 (m-minerd.exe), hardware is 9 dumpster class servers with 2 6-core AMD Opteron 2431 CPUs (2.4 GHz) each. Total power is ~1.8KW.
I am curious about one thing though. The revenue lost, if any, by the pools due to inflated payouts.
For example, an individual has an automatic payout at 1 xmg on minerclaim. That is subject to a fee of 0.05 xmg. Because of "inflation" they are consistently receiving 2+ xmg before the payout occurs.
The cost of wasted bandwidth due to orphan blocks which, depending on the pool (as there are more than just minerclaim)...
The amount of money and/or alternative cryptocurrencies paid out by various exchanges for what could be considered (and has been called) counterfeit coins...
So the term "thief" could apply, albeit loosely.