Heated isn't the right word. It has mostly been strawmen, red herrings, and various fallacies thrown about with a specific strategy of repeating the same rebutted bits again and again. I would use the word noisy.
There were some useful posts earlier on but the noise increasingly drowned out the signal. I admit that the way I framed the discussion was a tad dramatic but that doesn't explain the level of nonsense in that thread. You should have seen some of the posts that were scrubbed. I was called all sorts of things, like a fraudster and so on by a poster that I think is a sockpuppet. One post alone had like five different ad hominems in it.
Attempts to rebut include:
1) People should feel very grateful that Intel lets them buy their products.
2) Enthusiasts don't matter at all to Intel so they're fortunate they can buy anything at all. (I guess Devil's Canyon was marketed to casuals and there was no PR about improved TIM.)
3) There is no evidence that the TIM causes a heat bottleneck.
4) There is no evidence that delidding is even worse to support given the thinner substrate.
5) There is no way to see that Intel has a strong incentive to use substandard TIM to encourage delidding.
6) "No one is forcing you to X." (Which avoids the fact that Intel is forcing us to have only certain choices that we can make, something the OC3D article's author pointed out clearly.)
7) Intel is a totalitarian regime so we should never expect them to make products we actually want to buy.
8) Consumers are completely powerless (despite a capitalist market economy), should remain that way, and should be pleased about it.
9) Few enthusiasts care about the heat bottleneck due to the use of low-performance polymer TIM.
10) I am a crazy/bad/naive/fraudulent/incompetent/young person.
11) If you want solder you should stop whining and get a Haswell E (which ignores the fact that that does not have a Skylake core for things like H.265 QuickSync, the efficiency improvements made to the cores such as how integer is handled, the power consumption improvements from 14nm, and the fact that six - eight core CPUs are not needed for gaming rigs but fast quads that are not heat bottlenecked by substandard TIM are in demand for that).
12) There is no evidence that gaming is driving purchases of higher-end PC components, like i7s (see point 11 about the need for six - eight cores).
13) Solder or liquid metal TIM would be so expensive per chip that enthusiasts would be very upset (riiight).
14) Solder can't be used because the process is too small (buy apparently it could be used for Haswell E but not regular Ivy).
15) Solder is too unreliable to be trustworthy (no proof for this was given, of course).
16) It would take a lot of money/effort/time to be able to use solder (as if solder is a brand new thing).
17) Businesses have only one purpose = produce profit for shareholders. As a result of there being just one purpose, they can completely ignore what potential/past/current want to buy. Businesses don't have a second purpose (don't alienate the customer so they will pass on buying your product, spend less on an inferior product of yours that has a lower margin for you, or purchase another company's product).
I may have forgotten others but I have yet to see data or logic that actually rebuts what I was saying and the data I presented to back it up. I haven't checked the thread for a while so it's possible something substantive has been added but I wouldn't hold my breath.