I tend to agree with dwdallam -- that the guy probably knows what he's talking about, but wrote it badly.
I think Schewe overstates the argument. (He also states it badly, as did the guy who started the controversy.) You don't always want MORE photons, because then you'd have nothing but a white exposure, with everything blown; what you want is the OPTIMUM number of photons for whatever you're trying to do. You MAY want the MOST photons you can get without blowing the highlights. But maybe not -- in some photographs, you may choose to completely blow the highlights, because there's something in the shadows that's more important to get right.
This goes back to my dark church example. You may want to expose for the shadows and let the highlights go, something that happens when you are in dark places where flash is not allowed, but you'd like to get a sense of the colors. It happens in churches, museums, etc. If you are shooting, say, a great colorful painting in a dim gallery lit with clerestory windows -- not an uncommon situation -- you may want to let the window highlights blow so you can get the best possible, accurate, noise-free color in the painting. In this case, you don't care about the highlights: they're irrelevant. You may even crop them out later. In effect, you're exposing for the shadows. So, I don't think that idea is in any way stupid or wrong, it's just not the conventional use of a camera in catching a landscape. (Though sometimes the same thing comes up in landscapes, when you choose to deliberately blow the highlights, particularly if you're shooting close to the setting sun, but don't want the sun, only the raking shadows.)
In fact, I'd say that perhaps in a majority of indoor photos where flash is not allowed, but where there are cracks or small windows or reflections or other hot lights, but where the main action is in shadow -- a wedding -- you may be much more interested in the shadows than in not blowing certain highlights, which, in effect, act like specular highlights in a normally exposed photograph. That is, they are completely blown, but nobody cares, because they are small and irrelevant. In a very dark church I can easily imagine choosing to blow background candles in order to get a little noise-free color in the bridesmaids' dresses...
On another matter, I appreciate Andrew Rodney's attempt to explain to me about shoulders, but there were several words in the explanation that I didn't understand.
JC