Maybe it is authoritative commentary but you refuse to see it because it doesn't match your own confirmation bias? After all, you're certain that you and pemerton aren't exceptions, but you seem to be basing that on little data that isn't unbiased itself. Could it be that he's not ignorant or that he's not just doing some market-speak but that he has noticed a real trend based on the data he values or trusts? I think that's certainly a third option along with the "only two" you lay out.
If you're looking for a a completely disfunctional conversation where we impute each others cognitive sensibilities, self-awareness, and pretension to objectivity you can have it with someone else. You don't know me from Adam nor I you; not each other's moral bank accounts, not each other's intellectual quotient, nor each other's line or body of work. So that isn't going anywhere.
However, I do know each of those things about myself and I know that Mearls design thoughts (as a WotC rep) are public record so I can comment on those things and try to divine how we are where we are. I know that I have no conflict of interest; no dog in this fight. I'm not trying to sell a new product nor am I trying to groom an evolving resume as a platform from which I can use to sell new products. I have not had thoughts on RPGs that are all over the proverbial map just a few years apart. I've not been a part of a product line that endorsed scene-based play and used inflammatory rhetoric toward many classic approaches ("get to the fun" and "skip the guards") that produced wild backlash against the product from the word "go." I've not candidly endorsed the product and then written some solid, official articles on Skill Challenges that appear to reveal my understanding of the intent and means of proper actualizaton of the resolution mechanics. I've not then gone onto writing an adventure that is disfunctional with respect to leveraging the ruleset's strengths. I've not then hired a known indie savant to head up the penning of the DMG2 which unabashadly advocates for the narrative and metagame strengths of 4e. I've not then helped produce, and advocated for, a line of rewrites with softer edges with respect to those exact strengths (or something?) that attempts a gateway product for either entry level gamers or more metagame averse gamers (or something?...still don't know). I've not then been front and center lead on a new design iteration that overtly courts all of the gaming sensibilities that 4e's launch and mechanics were either unfriendly toward, ambivalent on, or indifferent to. I've not then spoke about courting everyone in a big tent approach while then (oddly) going the 4e launch route again and either accidentally or willfully invoking badwrongfun rhetoric that, if you're in the business, you know is inflammatory and would be out and out edition warring on this message board (and would fail to court the people you're alleging to want to court).
My line on 4th edition has been extremely consistent; it works amazingly well as a ruleset that produces a scene-based gamist/narrativist table experience with tools that can drift it toward light sim and serial, procedural play (if you wish...but you don't have to). I am not only not metagame adverse, I appreciate a robust metagame as it facilitates the play I'm looking for. 4e shines here. It facilitates this play masterfully; so coherently that it would be nigh impossible for it to be by accident. However, its ruleset components are compartmentalized enough that if you want to do nothing but a * closed series of Action Scenes as tactical combat encounters, you can do it. If you want to do nothing but a ** closed series of Action Scenes as narrative-driven, non-combat conflicts that you resolve via the resolution mechanics, you can do it. If you want to do nothing but *** Transition Scenes, you can do so with the recovery mechanics and the Ritual mechanics (that include crafting magic items as well as spending resources on Divinations, etc). If you want **** more overlap such that your game is more open/serial rather than strictly closed scene-based, you can certainly do so via aggressive leveraging of the objective task resolution system, the Ritual mechanics, and the Condition/Disease Track mechanics.
However, if you are rabidly metagame-averse want a totally metagame-neutral experience, then you are going to have trouble as the Encounter Power system and the Healing Surge system is baked into core. But, every single edition of D&D has had metagame mechanics baked into core os this is just a threshold issue. If you're of the opinion of OLD METAGAME MECHANICS GOOD/OK...new metagame mechanics...BAD...then 4e isn't going to scratch your itch...and will likely cause it to fester.
Besides all of this, I've watched 3 Encounters sessions at a local hobby shop just to collect a few data points. My limited exposure to these yielded datapoints of play experience that were exclusively pick-up games where approximately 9 - 16 year olds primarily play out * above (a series of tactical skirmishes) and try their hand a bit at ** (which I've seen produce some really good stuff a few times but most often either humorously bad or grossly robotic as they awkwardly claw their way through the scene). A very light evening of fun for groups of sugary soda-infused 5 - 7 boys (I didn't see a single girl) where they rode their bikes or walked after school or their parents dropped them off and picked them up a few hours later. I didn't see any of these player entitlement issues manifest there.
I didn't see any of this insidiuous protesting over DCs, encounter levels, or wealth by level. Again, these were sugar-infused, immature, adolescent boys...a veritable time-bomb of discord. I'm sure it happens, I just haven't seen it. Maybe those such scenarios comprise that mountain of formal data? I have no idea as I haven't vetted it. If it is the case though, that isn't particularly compelling as a line of evidence for something being internal locus control of or endemic to a ruleset. Because I have, however, seen plenty of protestations by my nephew and his friends while they play Minecraft or Stratego or Star Wars Monopoly or Nerf Gun Wars (who hit whom and all of that).
Personally in my home games (where I would hope there would be real, formal data), throughout the run of 3e and 4e (where apparently this "player entitlement" is so rampant), I have witnessed it 0 times in the almost 5 years of play of 4e and only twice in the 9 years of play of 3.x. My groups in 3.x were much large and more transient so there was a considerably larger cross-section of the gamer populace available for me to personally behold. One issue was a "my Wand of Polymorph eats up more of my wealth/level than his Wand of Cure Light Wounds but his is affects the game far more" while the second was just a "My Fighter sucks compared to his Generalist Wizard so I need a lot more treasure than the wealth/level warrants o make up the difference...gimme". In truth, both players were fundamentally correct in their reasoning, they handled it well outside of the game...we talked about it as a group and fixed the issues with unwieldy band-aids. Neither of which were in the same universe of insidious as LFQW or a cavalcade of strategic I win and fiat buttons cordoned into one spectrum of the Class populace and the subsequent racking of my brain to try to prepare content to challenge wildly dispirate power levels twixt my players (which was the source of most of my players' rancor).