It's hard to see yourself the way others see you, but I do recall one of my experiences of a Moose maven in IRC being so obviously aggressive that all I could say was "My, my..." and eventually others had to step in and _very_ gingerly -- lest they incur his wrath -- assert that maybe I wasn't just a know-nothing idiot. This wasn't the only unpleasantness in the Moose IRC channel I encountered but it was one of the earliest and most obviously, to me, unprovoked.

There is a sense in some particularly ego-attached to Moose (as with any theoretic construct) that even an ignorant question honestly asked about how one can go about doing something that isn't well supported by Moose _must_ be indicative of a lack of understanding of basic principles of programming or something. This isn't the way to make friends and influence people.

I've tried dealing with this by presenting as obsequiously as I can without sounding sarcastic -- and been criticized, in a rather inflammatory manner, for that too.

Its hard to know how to disarm these environments.