If Hacker News is about the tech industry then we need to see the tech industry clearly, warts and all.
We cannot run away from it. We cannot memory hole it.
More importantly, the issue isn't whether people are boo or yay; it's that both the boo comments and the yay comments are repetitive, nasty, and boring...keeping in mind that something can be both boring and intense at the same time. Since that's what we're trying to avoid here, we should avoid it in this case as well.
The only other place to discuss it are the one million threads on reddit, where all the top level comments are bots. Again I agree with your points, but not your conclusion.
On HN the idea is we want some, but not too much, discussion of such issues, and for the discussion to be intellectually curious rather than flamingly indignant. For the first point to work, we can't have too many threads; and for the second to work, the threads we do have need to be based on more substantive articles (and events).
Do you consider this interpretation of the topic interesting and 'curious' enough for hackernews?
One of the main reasons that I come here is to interact with people in the tech industry and I think that the opinions of the people who work for the man or who have worked for the man about this event are important to hear.
If it were verified employees saying what they really think, would that be interesting? Sure. Even then though, keep in mind that HN's standard isn't "interesting", it's intellectually interesting. Similarly, it isn't "gratify curiosity", it's "gratify intellectual curiosity" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
There are other kinds of curiosity (e.g. social curiosity) and they're interesting too (to me also!) but they're not the same as intellectual curiosity and thus not what this site is primarily for.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
As I said above, part of the draw of this website is having a chance to see the comments from people who may or may not have the experience that they claim to have and to decide yourself if what they're saying has merit. A big difference between this site and Reddit is that people often use their real names and they'll even sometimes link to their github pages or resumes. Even if they're using pseudonyms they'll have extensive comment histories that span years of thoroughly written comments. All of this is stuff that can allow the reader to better judge the veracity of claims made. Regardless of the difficulty in verifying people's claims it's really hard to find another website that such a great concentration of people in these kinds of fields.
And there is an intellectual curiosity to this subject, but it isn't the kind that can be encapsulated in a single discussion. The value in something like this comes over time as a chain of discussions are posted on a site like HN. This allows us to observe and understand how people's opinions on this controversial figure evolve over time.
Imagine if HN existed during the time when Von Braun became instrumental in the American space program. Being able to go back and read comments on that critical and fascinating slice of American history and geopolitics would be fascinating even if it's the mundane knee-jerk crap that people post on forums immediately after events like these. Historians would certainly find it absolutely intellectually interesting. It's the kind of content that would even shape contemporary conversations about this current event.
I understand that there are extreme difficulties in moderating these kinds of discussions but there is absolutely merit in these kinds of discussions happening on a site like HN.