alt Hacker News[...] because if a writer enters an infinite loop while writing the shared data, that will stop progress in any other algorithm [...]
Even if you have
while (true) { sharedData.writeWaitFree(randomData) }
If, on the other hand, you mean that some threads will enter an infinite loop inside of a read or write operation, then you have a bug in your wait-free algorithm and all bets are off. But we would generally assume that the implementation is good and the erroneous behavior is external.
Whatever is your writeWaitFree, nothing can stop another thread to do plain writes.
In that case no other thread can make progress.
I agree that this is a very unlikely case, but the case when a thread is halted inside the critical region can also appear only as a consequence of some bug, and such unlikely occurrences cannot justify wasting time at every access of shared data by using a too complicated wait-free algorithm.