I think part of it (now that I've read some more con reports) is also that there were a couple of panels that were specifically *meant* to be about generating lists and not much else, and if you went to a bunch of them not realizing it, and then hit meta panels that started the same way, I can see it getting really frustrating (and I avoided all of the lets-list-source-canons ones except the one where I really wanted the list, so that didn't get to me, but then I've been to every con-txt and sort of know what to expect, I guess.)