So, who was more stupid, the user who took for granted that Mozilla knew what they were doing and trusted a crappily written uninstaller, or the Mozilla folks who couldn't drop everything until the problem was fixed?
How ironic, that I'm not "stupid" because I'm one of the rare ones that call Mozilla on the carpet for this, but instead I get called a Redmond shill. There's just no way of winning with the True Believers.
A lot of people from within Mozilla were calling them on this. It was noticed at beta 0.8 and there were immediate calls for a hold on 0.9 until it could be fixed. Mozilla was still under AOL/Netscape's thumb at the time, which probably contributed to the push for 1.0 before show-stopper bugs like this were fixed (you know how proprietary software companies normally are about meeting their release timelines no matter what).
I can't excuse it at the time, but I can say Mozilla is, legally and in reality, a very different organization from the one that allowed that to happen.
It's almost like two years from now blaming Disney's animation division for releasing the horrid Pocahontas 2.