Motl's certainly opinionated, isn't he? He's a little too smarmy, but that's common among too many theorists (unfortunately). I'm taking his comments with a grain of salt.

I took the paper as being one that's mainly about geometry, so I wasn't surprised that there wasn't much discussion of Hamiltonians and the like. The article in the New Scientist with the interviews with Smolin and Finkelstein certainly didn't make it seem like he was a crank.

I like Peter Woit's comments on [link|http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=617|Not Even Wrong].

Lisi's [link|http://deferentialgeometry.org/|blog] seems very straight-forward, but that means nothing in the greater scheme of things.

I think this topic has an undercurrent of String Theory lovers versus ST haters. Where the truth is, I don't know.

FWIW.

Cheers,
Scott.