Its hard to reconcile the guy that says if a dev has a good idea that conflicts with prior plans you should usually go for it with the idea that he was simultaneously trying to shove his own personal gameplay preferences onto everyone else.
I'm not sure it is hard to reconcile the two. Really, what you could argue is that he was doing with the prior continuity and story lines what he wanted to do to altitis: saying "I have a better idea, and I'm going to try to make it happen whether it really fits the current game or not."
Now, to borrow a phrase from Obama, let me be clear: I loved Posi as a Dev. I even tried Star Trek Online just because he's running it now, and I find Star Trek REALLY boring. I think CoH was excellent, usually, in listening to their players' feedback and desires. That doesn't mean that Posi didn't have his OWN desires, and that those desires were at odds, sometimes, with the community. That's just the nature of design, especially in the technical realm. But just because he's a smart enough businessman and politician to listen to his customers demands when they're passionate enough, it doesn't mean he didn't have very serious feelings of his own and a desire to take the game in a different direction.
To bring it full circle, maybe Posi is like Microsoft, and maybe his vision of curbing alts was similar to Window's vision of Windows 8 being a single user interface for all devices. Sounds good on paper, may even work, may even be necessary for the continued success of the system, but the shock and bother the idea causes to the customer base might force some careful treading or even a retreat.
In my opinion, that's what we saw in this article. Posi had his opinion and, given free reign and ultimate time, he would have liked to change things quite a bit. That's not "bad" or "wrong", so we don't need to pretend he wasn't making that desire clear in the article. It was his opinion and desires shared while reflecting on it months after the shutdown, just as some players' responses were the same thing: opinions and desires about what would have made CoH a better game.
Personally, I liked the end game Incarnate Stuff, overall. My only real problem with it was the focus on RAIDS over almost everything else early on. I always felt like CoH worked best, for me at least, because of the 5-8 man team sizes. I'd have REALLY liked some of the iTrials more if they had been Task Forces, not large scale raids. I think the Lambda is the best example of this, followed closely by TPN and Minds of Mayhem. These really could have been set to run from 6-8 members total with the difficulty of the enemies scaled down slightly to compensate for the smaller teams and I think it would have been "better". First, I think it would have "felt" more super going against some of these foes in smaller teams. Somehow, piling on to 1 guy with 22 other heroes and still taking 10 minutes to take him down doesn't seem impressive. Secondly, these could have been run more often/casually, even on smaller servers. The problem I had was that the only two Task Forces the Incarnate content gave us gave out drastically weaker rewards than the actual Trials, even though, in my opinion, they weren't much different in difficulty. To me, the way the system was laid out, it really was trying to get everyone in on the "Raids," but due to customer resistance, tossed a few bones out to people who refused. It's kind of like Windows 10 keeping the metro interface but giving back the start button, with a built in metro interface. :-)
I think, had at least a few of the ITrials really been TFs, but offer full rewards like other trials, you may have found the perfect balance. Heck, I always wished they'd included some incarnate content that was gated at -4- players max, and balanced around being really tough on a smaller team, but with nice rewards. Something to say that now that we're so big and powerful, they're going to really challenge us as individual heroes. It would also have prevented those people who can easily sit back and leech in an over sized raid team. Feel like a raid, instead of the smaller challenge? That's cool, run a Baf. Have a five friends from your SG on, but don't have time/desire to find 10 other players to do a BaF? That's cool, just run a Lambda or TPN with the six of you.
All that being said, I REALLY wish we would have been around long enough to see this come to fruition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9dVlNA1SMM