Me too, and I agree with you. I would be interested to hear from anybody who currently works as a professional web developer and thinks that supporting a well-defined set of browsers is a bad idea. I suspect that a lot of this negative commentary is coming from people who have no idea what kind of workload can be added by supporting an extra browser.
The issue isn't "supporting". They actively went out of their way to specifically add code blocking Opera's user-agent string. It's more work to that than to let it through and let it fail if it must.
