The sentence 'The truth is probably somewhere in the middle', while it is qualified, is clearly meant, emotively, to appeal to the golden mean fallacy. Stop splitting hairs, Bob.
Wow, you combined three logical fallacies in one sentence. First, you used ad hominem fallacy. You asserted an intent to deceive. Second, you used the strawman fallacy twice. You asserted that a qualified statement "really" wasn't qualified, and you asserted that the argument was "emotive" when it wasn't., Third, you used the dual of the golden mean fallacy. Namely, you implied that the truth must lie at one extreme, since believing anything else would constitute the golden mean fallacy.
I didn't assert an intent to deceive. You asserted that the original poster didn't mean it when he qualified his statement. So, yes, you did.
Alternately, I am demonstrating how irrational and illogical what passes for "rhetoric" is nowadays.
In today's "rhetoric" when someone says, "I think the truth lies somewhere in between." they are expressing an opinion. Opinions are opinions, not arguments. Only arguments can be fallacious. Opinions are either factually correct, or incorrect.
Empirically, if you asked a thousand judges, "In the cases where the positions between two parties conflict, and that difference cannot be the result of honest differences of perceptive, etc., in your judgment, in most of those cases is one party telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, or does the Truth lie somewhere in between?," I'd suspect that most judges would chose the latter option. While assuming the Golden Mean is fallacious, it is also the way to bet!
No matter how formal, or informal your attempt at logic were, you were simply wrong to dispute the logic of an opinion. You dispute the factual accuracy of an opinion.
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