For whatever it’s worth, I read “I found this one distasteful” as more aggressive than “This is the worst of the 25 articles, most of which were good”. One article has to be the worst after all, and so that sentence alone might not even be a real criticism. I see the actual criticism in the next half-sentence “and believe it has negative expected value”, which feels to me pretty non-aggressive.
For whatever it’s worth, I read “I found this one distasteful” as more aggressive than “This is the worst of the 25 articles, most of which were good”. One article has to be the worst after all, and so that sentence alone might not even be a real criticism. I see the actual criticism in the next half-sentence “and believe it has negative expected value”, which feels to me pretty non-aggressive.