It was more that I was referring specifically to naive new SEOs when the quote about banning was mentioned. I was not referring to SEO in general. We were discussing specifically how a lot of new people that are getting into SEO read about SEO techniques, on bulletin boards/newsgroups such as these, that are often considered over optimizing and when their site gets banned they get very angry as they were not aware of the consequences of using these techniques. That was the context of the "we ban them" comment. It was said in an unfortunate and somewhat sympathetic tone which did not come across in the article.
Garrett, I have no problem with the article but I wanted to just clarify the context of the quote as some people have been asking me about it.