Hm. Yeah, I really need to adjust my view on this - I found NIST's responses dodgy precisely because they seemed so unwilling to engage, and I still thought of him as respected enough to warrant better responses.
If he's turned so crank-y that his peers simply no longer engage with him beyond the strictly necessary, then this all looks a bit different.
I'd still love to see some of his specific criticisms addressed, but that becomes a minor point...
It actually doesn't, because NIST needs to speak to and be trusted by more than just a tiny clique. Djb crypto is widely known and used which means they have to deal with him whether they like it or not.
It does for me, because his criticism (since shown to be wrong) never included the claim that KYBER was broken, just that it wasn't perfect and that he was unfairly treated.
Cranks and assholes occasionally are unfairly treated, but generally are fairly ignored - the effort of dealing with their claims aren't worth it.
As an outsider, "respected cryptographer makes a narrow technical claim and is brushed off by NIST" and "sore loser that no-one talks to complains that people aren't entertaining his latest complaint about the ref" are very different situations, from which I will take very different actions.
You're making decisions based on trivial social factors instead of the only salient point, which is that NIST had proven itself to be corrupted in the past when it comes to setting cryptographic standards.
If he's turned so crank-y that his peers simply no longer engage with him beyond the strictly necessary, then this all looks a bit different.
I'd still love to see some of his specific criticisms addressed, but that becomes a minor point...