The reason my tone was so strong was because at this stage in its development, the DAI modding community is small, and every loss is felt to the core. And we have lost modders due to harassment and unwarranted criticism. I believe one reason that your comment struck such a sour note with both skaramoosh and myself is that hair modders have been accused of so-called 'gender-gating' their hair mods and deliberately withholding some hair mods from other genders for... well, honestly I have no idea of the reasons.
So, when you mentioned that you didn't understand why the female had been removed and the male left, yes, it struck a raw nerve, and that is why we reacted as we did. There has, unfortunately, been indirect and direct harassment of several modders - up to and including users here on the BSN actively harassing and denigrating modders here and on other websites using a variety of online personas. This harassment has reached the point where several modders have withdrawn from the modding community entirely - and not always new modders, but also some veterans who were crucial to the early days of the DAI modding process.
Those losses are keenly felt. Thus, we seek to protect each other from what we may perceive to be unwarranted criticism (as opposed to constructive criticism, such as 'oops there's a stray texture' or 'them pixels look mighty blurred'.)
As such, yes, I think that there was an element of that to the responses to your initial comment.
As skaramoosh mentioned, the Side Swept Hair they put on the Nexus for male elves is different than the side swept hair for female/males that was removed earlier. Skaramoosh also received a great deal of heat for the decision to remove that hair, but it was their decision to remove it and theirs alone, and their decision to put the newer version of the male one only up.
The problem is that disincentive to create mods (or 'sapping the desire to mod' as I called it) does not only come from the bad parts of the fandom. Most of the hair modders in particular have been bombarded with requests to port their hairs, from male to female, from elf to human, from human to qunari, etc, etc, etc. After getting dozens or hundreds of such kinds of messages, it does strike a bad note to see someone who *seems* to be making a similar request, or who *seems* to be criticizing a modder's decision to take a mod down.
Emotions are high. Modding should be fun, but in recent weeks, much of the shine has been taken off. Fewer modders are active right now (as can be seen by how slowly this thread is updated), and a lot of the modders have either quit or moved on to other projects. Thus the modders who are left get more attention and requests, and that doesn't help either.
In short, we *do* try to appreciate heartfelt support and sincere good wishes, but enough has happened of late that we don't always expect it from the fandom when they interact with the modders directly. And that is unfortunate and sad.