As a venue for discussions, the Internet is by far the most abused and abusable created yet. We all tend to say things we would not say if we were face to face, and there is no secondary information to go on, such as body language (the little emoticons try to do this, but they fall short of the real thing). Bottom line -- ruffled feathers are the soup of the day.
You will always find folks who think they have the answers and you don't, or that their rig is the perfect example of off-road transportation which, by definition then, would make your example inferior. Such folks lack experience and perspective. If they truly had the experience and perspective from which to judge others, they would admit that stock and lightly modified vehicles often do as well as or better than highly modified vehicles, all depending on driver skills, terrain, and chance. I have sunk in more than one bog only to be passed and subsequently rescued by stock TJ's on 33" Mud Kings. Life is like that. When you meet someone whose attitudes are as you describe, just smile. You can't educate a pig.
Trail ratings are entirely subjective, and frequently mean very little if the trail in question is subject to change over time from overuse or weather conditions. Even on a stable trail, weather discounted, what constitutes a 3 for one guy could look a lot like a 5 to another, and even after 37 years of driving off road, I still look at rocky, steep climbs and think "no way" then drive right up them with mo more modification and 32" tires and a rear locker in an otherwise stock 40 year old Jeep. Point here is that trail ratings can fool you and they should only be taken with salt, as a guideline to preparations and expectations. Then, too, what looks difficult to me in the 40 year old CJ5 looks boring when I drive the CJ-7. As there is really no standard per se for rating trails, I suggest no one should get lost in the smoke over them. Go drive the trail, then you will know what you think of it.
I used to drive the CJ-7 in essentially stock form. 31x10.5x15 BFG MT tires, open diffs, 2.5L four cylinder gerbil power, and the lightest 4-speed known to man. No winch, no self-recovery gear on board, tow points that, today, would be embarrassing to me because of the shoddy execution, and a carburetor from hell. With this rig, and with wife and puppy on board, in a group of only 4 other vehicles manned by folks I had never met before, we crossed the Talkeetna Mountains on an 8 mile long trail that, up to that point in 1997, had never been done by street legal vehicles in summer time. It was generally considered to be impassable beyond the top of the first hill climb. We constantly did things that day that the trail guide thought we, in our Jeeps, could not do (she was driving a tundra buggy and thought little Jeeps were, well, just little Jeeps). We kept going and going until finally no one thought it so strange that we were still with the group. Everyone got stuck somewhere (far more than once). Everyone got the chance to cross some place that someone else didn't. I crossed with ease an evil mud hole that the tundra buggy sunk in and had to be rescued. The trail in question was rated off the chart for difficulty. We made it anyway. At some point, every modification on each vehicle had value, or got in the way. There is no such thing as a perfectly modified (or perfectly engineered) vehicle. Those who believe that because of the state of build of their vehicle they are necessarily superior to others, especially if they think they are superior to all others, are simply mistaken in their beliefs. But so are all fanatics.
At the end of the day, the state of modification of the vehicle is less important than the skill of the person driving it. Take whatever you drive and drive it until you know all of its limits and all of your own limits, and you will not only then know whether you need to modify something on your vehicle and why, but you will also be a better driver than the guys that think you have to have X size tires or whatever to conquer a trail.
Why can't we all just get along? Because we are all different. Always have been, always will be.
