The forums kind of skew things towards one side or the other, and when you're trying to pick representative viewpoints on a story it's easier to pick one from each extreme than the more nuanced ones in the center, because nuance requires length. Plus the forums tend to radicalize discussion because civil argument is most of the point, so people tend to chose sides.
I, for one, loved Hell is the Absence of God, and ended up borrowing the anthology that it's from to read the author's other stories.