I think that what has happened here is a classic case of clique-ism. I've seen it many times in many places. A group of people who have a common interest (in this case, Toronto high-rises) are engaged in a continual conversation about that topic, and eventually the more frequent posters form an "in-group" with self-perceived higher standards than those plebians not in the group. At the same time, the group's accepted opinions about whatever their common interest is, become ever more rarefied and out of touch with the mainstream views. Eventually the in-group's commonly accepted positions become so divergent from the wider norms that they conclude that they, and only they, are perceptive enough to see the truth, while everyone else is an ignorant idiot. This process seems to eventually happen all the time, whatever the common interest is.
Has anybody considered that perhaps the committee knows what they are doing? The common opinion here -- which is the opposite of almost every informed opinion I have seen elsewhere -- is that Aqua's reputation is undeserved, that it is "a box with delusions of grandeur". I think that instead of Aqua being so bad, this is a case of the UT in-group stroking their own egos by stating that they have a greater appreciation of, and knowledge of, architecture than the rest of the world does, including this committee. This type of thinking is a fairly standard example of tribalism, where some in-group, in this case the UT clique, considers itself self-evidently better than the corresponding out-group. This thinking is also seen in the way that newcomers to UT are attacked for holding opinions different than the standard UT beliefs.
