Yes I read the linked article, and the Andy Greenberg article and I watched the CCC talk ... both of which the blog post does not link to. So I've read it all. Have you?

I don't think my points are factually incorrect. Please name me one hidden service where (a) the operators are actually anonymous and (b) the man on the street might have actually heard about it and (c) what's going on there is not either illegal or unethical. I claim there are none: all the hidden services that have had mainstream coverage are illegal.

The blog post is the same as always: the Tor people never give specific examples of hidden services that are beneficial and always talk in generalities, because there are so few convincing good examples. Indeed it says the opposite - they want to boost usage.

Other than not linking to the material they're discussing, they also didn't mention the key finding that is causing such a ruckus: over 80% of all hidden service lookups are to child abuse sites.

They say this might be due to law enforcement crawlers, although there is no evidence of this and it leads to the question of why other illegal sites like black markets aren't being crawled just as aggressively.

There is a train of thought, like AlyssaRowan's post above, that says Tor cannot change anything because otherwise it wouldn't be Tor any more. I don't think that's correct. A peer to peer network is ultimately just a group of people working together for a shared goal. That community of people can define the rules for the services they provide, for example Tor tries by default to block torrenting because they collectively decided that they prefer not to spend their resources on that.

Bitcoin is another example of an opinionated P2P network. It enforces rather unorthodox rules about inflation and money creation, rules that alt coins often change. Regardless the people taking part in the Bitcoin network specifically have these opinions about the way to manage the monetary base and other people who try to deviate from those rules are effectively kicked out/ignored.

Tor and its community could become opinionated about the use of hidden services. They could say hidden services are intended for political communication and organisation, for example (along with whatever other useful things they think of), but not for child abuse. There is nothing technically stopping them, as the CCC talk pointed out. But they have collectively decided not to.