I agree completely, but I will also confess that I have had basically the same thought. @DrDeth reminds me very strongly of a guy I used to work with — reasonably intelligent, but obsessed with being perceived as smarter than he was, constantly barging in on office conversations to assure everyone he had facts and opinions on every topic; quick to draw conclusions, and even quicker to fixate on them, with no ability to adjust his thinking once he’d made a decision; incapable of reading the subtleties of social situations, and no understanding that people’s emotional relationship to their thoughts and opinions is just as important, in terms of getting along with others, as the bare facts being expressed in the conversation; and so on. This fast-processing information-first approach made him a very effective IT specialist, but he had difficulty making and keeping friends; everyone in the office held him at arm’s length except when they really needed his (narrow) expertise.
Looking back, this guy was clearly what we would today call “neuroatypical,” but I hesitate to draw any more specific conclusion than that, even though I knew him pretty well. And as strongly as the subject of this thread reminds me of that guy, as much as I want to draw a connection and make an assumption about what’s driving his behavior, I tell myself I’ve never met him in person, and that it would be irresponsible and uncharitable to try to impose my constrained guesses on him. I also think back to that other guy, and however much he drove all of us crazy, I remember the moment I realized how frustrating it must have been just to be him — he was clearly wired in a particular way, and was endlessly irritated that the world refused to cooperate with his (off-center) understanding of it. From that moment, I tried to be more patient and sympathetic, but I still didn’t want to be friends with him.
The same kind of situation applies here. I would like to think he’s making progress in the other thread where his irritating behaviors are being catalogued, and he’s reluctantly conceding the issues one by one and promising to think about them and make adjustments. And, per the above, I don’t want to make the offensive mistake of saying “he’s clearly behaving according to (DSM V label).” Nevertheless, I still think there’s some kind of underlying commonality that could unify everything, and if he could just get a handle on it, he’d make a significant leap in understanding himself and why his behavior is so abrasive to others.