Clearly no one has a problem with this research being described as interesting, exciting or important -- just with how it's being represented, by both the NS article's author and its enthusiastic supporters on this list, as though it were some sort of paradigmatic challenge to Darwinism... which is simply nonsense! And that also goes for the claims being made on this list about horizontal gene transfer being some sort of recent and big challenge to darwinism. This stuff is decades old and HGT's possible roles in evolution has been discussed and investigated for almost as long.
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Ease up partner, I don't think our sins are half as terrible as you seem to think.
No one claimed that this work was a "paradigmatic challenge to Darwinism..." which sounds like we're calling for the gentleman's work to be tossed on the fire. The phrase, "only part of the story" doesn't imply the replacement of one with the other but enhancement and continuance. The spirit was the same as a simple assertion that Newtonian mechanics is "only part of the story".
Also, I think we're aware the work is not new. The 1960s and 70s origin of Woese's research was brought up at least once, by me, as I recall. The point was the growing prominence of the ideas under discussion.
.d.