I see this as a classic case of "look, I took your billion lines of awful code and turned it into 4 lines of beautiful code!" but the new code does a tiny subset of the original, and isn't extendable in any of the original ways.
Edit: which isn't to say that his hack isn't cool, but he's still a jerk.
Edit: which isn't to say that his hack isn't cool, but he's still a jerk.