Stick with me here. Do you consider criticizing a handgun for not having a safety & shipping with a loaded clip a Luddite attack? After all, releasing the safety takes time before the gun could be fired, making it a less powerful as tool? Do you seriously feel that any critique of technology based on its possible misuse is invalid? Even when the likelihood of such misuse is demonstrably ... well jeesh, endemic to everyone in TF's little troll 
You're comparing apples to oranges. To make your analogy work, he'd have to be tricking people into shooting each other with that handgun rather than criticizing it. A roughly comparable situation would be if when you made a transfer of coins in Bitcoin the transaction contained your private key in plain-text by default - and you had to have access to closed-source source-code to change the settings to not broadcast it. In my view that's how bad an idea valuing, by default, all debt equally (at a non-zero value) is. The problem isn't that trust CAN be used to provide liquidity - it's that it does so by default.
Take a step back from the TF situation and consider what will happen when (and it WILL happen at some point) a gateway defaults. Is it really desirable that whoever happens to be around gets to shift all their debt from it to whoever happens to be offline (assuming the system gains enough traction that there are actually a signficiant number of users trusting multiple gateways)? Exposure to that kind of risk needs to be opted into by users (by them actively setting their trusted counterparties as exchangable) not something they have forced on them without warning the moment they trust more than one target.
You're totally off the topic here. This isn't about microscopic design features of Ripple. He didn't criticize a design feature, make points for and against it, and convince people that the design has a defect that should be changed. He devised a scheme to exploit what he thinks is a defect that hurt real people. (And, by the way, rational people are having that rational argument elsewhere. We're already talking about different design changes to reduce this risk.)Take a step back from the TF situation and consider what will happen when (and it WILL happen at some point) a gateway defaults. Is it really desirable that whoever happens to be around gets to shift all their debt from it to whoever happens to be offline (assuming the system gains enough traction that there are actually a signficiant number of users trusting multiple gateways)? Exposure to that kind of risk needs to be opted into by users (by them actively setting their trusted counterparties as exchangable) not something they have forced on them without warning the moment they trust more than one target.
