[joe_the_user]

Sure but you argue that problems of the sort you mention come from ambiguous grammars.

So, hand-created parsers may not flag ambiguous grammars and automatically generated parsers might (I've only done hand created parsers so I don't know).

And Steve Yegge quote just shows how much abstract languages are something you need to learn rather than something you can power your way through. And plenty of good programmers can power their way through almost any other kind of programming challenge so someone who seems very smart doing a very dumb thing in parsing doesn't surprise me (I've tried that myself).