Understanding the opinions and actions of aggydaggers becomes a lot easier once you start assuming that they are all bitter underachieving unloved losers who have been terminal outsiders all their lives

Why does the inner circle exist? Who do they circlejerk each other so much? Why do they ignore the good games while pedestalizing the mediocre slop of their peers? Easy, the people here have recreated a pseudo-high-school environment where they get to be the popular kids. They get to be the elite clique at the center of everything. In a way, they don't even give a shit about their steam performance, because at the end of it all they still have their status within the agdg ecosystem.
For the longest time I didn't understand why so many people here loved AI or discriminated my game but it all falls into place once you start paying attention. They despise me and my game because they view me as an insider - someone who's a real developer with real skills and real integrity, and because they can never have that they use their institutional power to blacklist me and undermine my game.
They love AI and despise skilled professionals for the same reason. The idea that there are people out there that have learned to drawn, or code, or write at a level that they can never reach is infuriating to them, so they need a way to get back at them and to "even the scales" so to speak. They want revenge, and are always looking for ways to achieve that despite their complete incompetence and lack of drive.

It's the mother of all crab buckets, and you don't get to throw stones when you are just another crab in a glass house. 99% of the developers here are complicity. You're losers taking it out on the world. I just came here to create stuff, and I never even suspected this place could be so corrupt and rotten and cynical and metaphysically evil