A couple of my racing friends have told me the same story about the dirt guys. While the racing is fun, the crowd can sometimes ruin it. They gave up dirt racing and now race touring cars on carpet. 5 of my friends and I run touring cars on carpet for 6 months of the year. The touring car crowd is competitive but still remains fun. Sure, you have the occasional asshole that thinks he's gonna win Nationals if only he can get past the locals. lol Now that I've been crawling, I hope to be able to do it year round because I'm really enjoying it.
Regarding this weird anti-Traxxas bias, it only seems to show up in certain places. Mainly I see it online with those clowns Harley and SBG. To me, it's plainly obvious that it's not so much the TRX4 that they don't like, but the 'TRX4 people.' Then there are the folks that are just, for some bizarre reason, anti portal. Recently we were talking to a guy with a new Element truck. Somehow a challenge came up and he said that his new Element could "do anything our X4's could do." After we showed him that that wasn't in fact the case, he actually said, "Well, still, I just don't like portal axles." WTF!