I would say HN has expanded in the type of readers. I enjoy a good discussion about text editors, and have enjoyed the ones about _TEXT_EDITOR_, but I do not recall any of those text editors posts resulting in a text editor flame war. If _TEXT_EDITOR_ is not your thing, nor is picking which text editor is the best, just skip the articles. I see only 1 text editor post on the front page right now. I only recall seeing 5 articles on text editors the last few days.
tl;dr
I like _TEXT_EDITOR_ but skip the articles if you don't care about how you flip your bits.
tl;dr I like _TEXT_EDITOR_ but skip the articles if you don't care about how you flip your bits.