I'm not sure how tone would be irrelevant; similar to what a sibling commenter said, tone conveys quite a bit of information. It seems unwise or "dumb" to ignore that, because we're still humans talking to each other, even if it's bits over a wire, and we're working together in good faith to learn and solve problems, aren't we?

Even a simple sentence like, "Ferguson did both of these things and his findings thus do not “undermine” our causal claims; he failed to accurately test our causal claims," comes across as scathing compared to the paper.

One idea might be to learn something new, if you don't have a project. Think about a textbook or a class, or online texts, or just some interesting popsci at the local bookstore/library for example. any might work depending on your style.

That said, I agree that their good games have made me a fan, and I hope the original staff keeps going in some form.

That said, the right tradeoffs can make it totally worth it. I think I joined one by accident, personally, but I feel that I have the best people, career growth and tech here (always wanted to do some networking work), so it still feels right to me.

(but, he was talking about doing science)

I suspect most people in power just don't subscribe to that. which is precisely why it's systemic to see the engineer shouting "no!" when John CEO says "we're doing it anyway." I'm not sure this is something you can just teach, because the audience definitely has reservations about adopting it.