I was going to save the bulk of this for my own site, but I'll share it briefly. Many of my ideas have been aided by repeat readings of "Addiction by Design" by the anthropologist Natasha Schull.

Modern machine gambling is now a generation old. It is the most addictive form of gambling, and many people have now been exposed to it for more than 20 years. There exists an entire generation of addicted machine gamblers. Unless they are utterly disciplined, incredibly experienced APs, they lose. They pretty up their addiction with words like "recreational" and "fun." I'm good with that because addictions and recreation and fun all pretty much seem to go together to me, at least in a superficial sense.

This site has a number of people who appear to be anti-AP. Bill Yung, Mr. Mendelson, LarryS, OneHit (now departed), Rob Singer (also banned), coach belly, and so on. The interesting thing is that none of them have proclaimed that they don't gamble or that gambling is wrong. What they each argue is that the APs are lying, making things up, and that they themselves wouldn't spend their valuable life hours APing if they could, although they will spend hours losing money because it's fun or recreational or budgeted as such.

Now the quick obvious conclusion is that the anti-APs have disdain for the APs because the anti-APs lose and the APs report that they don't. That's certainly logical. But here's my Twilight Zone twist. I think the anti-APs despise the APs because the APs have the ability, by definition, to get up and leave whenever the odds are against them. The anti-APs simply do not have that ability, given their addiction(s). They need "time on device" regardless of the odds, so they construct all kinds of mental masturbations like stop losses and per day budgets and defining machine gambling as "fun" to justify their behaviors. I submit that it's the APs alleged ability to NOT gamble (unless the EV is in their favor) that fuels the disdain and hatred for them by the anti-APs.