Insinuating that it's merely a tactic to silence debate of architectural principles strikes me as an effective way to curtail discussion of the use of architecture to signal class.

I wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes?! :D

For my part, I've lived in a lot of houses where the exteriors looked like that those of the houses lauded in the OP, and a few whose design more closely mimicked the "awful" McMansion styles.

I absolutely detested the interior spaces of the "good" houses, and the placement of "voids" on the house's frontal exterior had primary blame for that. I STRONGLY preferred the interior spaces of the McMansion-type homes, looking at the exteriors on the blog there, I abhor the "good" ones and actually kind of like most of the McMansions.

I assert that while the criticisms appear to be valid at first glance, that virtually ALL of the derision for McMansions comes because of class differences and their reputation for shoddy workmanship, and almost NONE of it is due to actual, objective architectural issues. There's no accounting for taste, taste accounts for 99% of the derision towards McMansions, and this particular taste is associated by most with the upwardly mobile yuppies who tend to buy them, which marks it for nigh-universal hate - as strongly as I feel about the "good" house photos on the blog, exteriors of houses I great up in and around that were nearly unusable inside, people feel that way about McMansions, and this is just a (noble) attempt at explaining that subtle, almost unconscious derision for this type of home.

Insinuating that aesthetic architectural principles are anything other than class signalling is a good way to silence a debate on class signalling which makes you uncomfortable