My friend Jay published a blog post today entitled Despised Software Luminaries and, for once, he got it all wrong. I know Martin and Obie , his examples in the post, from my time at Thoughtworks, and they're not software luminaries. They're software pundits.
Both of them spend a lot of time telling people how they think the software world should operate. Whenever you tell people how they should do something, it naturally leads to disagreement. It's that simple. People despise them because they disagree with them.
When I think software luminary, I think of people like Alan Kay, Fred Brooks, and Edsger Dijkstra. People that made fundamental changes to the way that we write software. People like Obie and Martin are smart, talkative guys, but they're not quite in the same league as those guys.
(See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award)