> clearly don't understand either deeply

No appetite for that. The MCP vs Skills debate has gradually become just a proxy war for the camps of AI skeptics vs AI boosters. Both sides view it as another chance to decide about more magic vs less, in absolute terms, without doing the work of thinking about anything situational. Nuance, questions, reasoning from first principles, focusing on purely engineering considerations is simply not welcome. The extreme factions do tend to agree that it might be a good idea to attack the middle though! There's no changing this stuff, so when it becomes tiresome it's time to just leave the HN comment section.