The guy talked a lot of smack about CoH when CO was in development. Some of it was quite harsh iirc.
I'm unaware of Jack Emmert saying very much about CoH while CO was in development one way or the other. Both he and the dev team often spoke the standard rhetoric about taking what was learned from one project and doing better in the next project, but that's normal. Jack was hammered for making comments about CoH while
STO was in development that some found unflattering, but at the time I didn't think they were all that noteworthy.
Honestly, I've said worse things about CoH than Jack has overall. It was I who once (twice, three times...) said CoH appeared to be designed by a random number generator, the animation system looked like a Rube Goldbergian wet dream, and if Cryptic was a person I wouldn't let him balance my checkbook. The fact is that everything I say was seen through the prism of being a long-time player and supporter of the game - and someone who would smite you with the dictionary for fun - while everything Jack ever said was seen through the prism of being someone who first was perceived as being the heavy that wouldn't let the game evolve in the direction the players wanted and then as someone who abandoned the game entirely.
The truth is that by the time momentum had really built to portray Jack as being the thing holding CoH back he had already mostly checked out and was involved primarily with MUO. In my opinion, Jack has always been someone that enjoyed conceptualizing games far more than implementing and supporting them. It was I that first came up with the "Johnny Appleseed" theory of Jack's direction for Cryptic. The reason why so many people, I believe, think Jack is callous is that he really simply isn't all that interested in the nitty gritty details that people simply assume he must think about constantly and must be the context of everything he says. Jack was often blamed for having bad ideas about subjects he literally
had no specific knowledge of. Or incorrect knowledge of. The story of Defiance 1.0 comes to mind.
We should cut Jack some slack. First, all evidence suggests that when Cryptic was first creating City of Heroes, the dev team was overreaching beyond their abilities farther than a kindergarten class trying to start a space program. If Jack hadn't come along with the vision he was so reviled for after launch, odds are we would have never had a game at all. Second, so much of what we blame Jack for in terms of holding back from the players are things the dev team couldn't have delivered on either way. Who outside Cryptic even knows all the things Jack said we shouldn't have that in fact he knew we couldn't have, because Cryptic couldn't deliver it.
He's just a guy who wants to work on the creative side of making MMOs. And we just happened to be his first. That's all. He's long moved on, and its long past the time we should let go of his shadow.