I suspect it’s more just that it doesn’t “fit“ the way all the other machines were, it stands out and not in an impressive way. It just sort of increases the otherness.
I agree the stuff about being harder for right hand is probably just made up after the fact as color commentary.
I think there’s just a bit of snobbery. It’s an off the shelf LPX chassis with a “Logic Board LPX-40” that Apple also supplied to clone makers. The floppy drive being on the “wrong” side is just proof that it somehow lacks that special something.
It's just because it looked like a WIntel PC and thus was a threat to the collective illusion that 1996-Apple offered anything substantially different or better than Windows '95 (source: was a 1996 Macintosh user who used the term “WIntel”)
I love PowerPC but I still don't believe CPU architecture alone is a motivating factor for why any person would choose to use a particular computer over any other. If that were true then Stebe Jovs never would have told me about The Megahertz Myth, now welcome Phil S[c]hiller to the stage to run the PentiumⅡ machine for this specially-scripted Photoshop benchmark, et cetera.
Reads like it was just a bad Mac all-around but the left-hand floppy drive was a visible symbol of that on the face of the machine because it was different from what was normal for a Macintosh in a machine that was full of things that were different from a normal Macintosh.
Also knowing Stephen Hackett, I don't think he's capable of hate for older Macs. He seems to love even the oddest of ducks and has a lab full of them.
I just went and tried inserting a floppy disk with either hand and it was exceptionally easy.
Wouldn't a left side disk drive and the standard right side mouse placement be a superior workflow?
Was the dislike just because of the change?