It's more like, these guys are offering a plan where you get treatment for stage IV cancer and you only have to pay if it works. The other options require you or someone else to pay huge amounts up front, regardless of outcome, and are no better at getting results.
I wasn't commenting on whether it works. I was showing that his objection to criticism that didn't include a suggested better alternative was illogical.
It wasn't just criticism without an alternative. It was saying, this thing is bad, don't use it. If the other things are worse, you still have to use it. This is why your analogy was ineffective, because you used a thing that was obvious worse than the other approaches.
People need to learn things. If funding education through an ISV is the best way to do that, then they should do that, even if there are problems with it. What the article really seemed to be implying was that they shouldn't do it that way, that there was something wrong with it, which justified an extremely negative view of the company, and leaves people with no option to learn to code without large upfront costs or loans to pay back if they are unsuccessful.
Describing the very best option in purely negative terms is misleading.
If you are telling people to stop doing a thing with a x% chance of working, but the other options have a lower chance of working, you are effectively saying don't do the thing at all.
You are assuming here that you and the speaker have a shared belief that this way to accomplish the thing has a chance of working and is worth doing in the absence of alternatives (or that it is obviously better than alternatives). That is almost certainly a false assumption when someone tells you "don't do that thing". Instead of continuing to hold those assumptions, you should either ignore their opinion altogether or attempt to find out which of those beliefs you don't share.
