alt Hacker NewsAh I see what you were trying to say. It read to me (with "He's a cryptographer. You're describing cryptographers.") like you were dismissing that knowledge about implementing and shipping cryptographic libraries is a relevant expertise (or that every cryptographer would have that, which they absolutely don't.) But, yeah, he's one among a whole bunch of experts in some of these fields and certainly shouldn't be given special weight just due to his name recognition.
Even the side channel stuff in particular --- Bernstein was certainly a popularizer of it, but that's been mainstream in cryptography research since the mid-2000s (and, obviously, it's Paul Kocher's claim to immortality).
One very big problem I have with Bernstein's recent activism is the way he writes to an audience you can just very clearly tell he thinks little of. He's assuming everybody who pays attention to this stuff has paid basically no attention at all to any cryptography he himself didn't write about. It's a bad argument, but that's not my big issue; my big issue is that he's making fools of his supporters. Not OK.