I kind of see what your point is, but I disagree. A person's right to point out flaws in a system should not be contingent upon having overcome those flaws. I see that it would be easy to feel more sympathy for the author if he had fought tooth and nail against the system and still come out on the losing end, but that is really a completely separate topic from whether his arguments about the system itself are justified or not. The weight of the arguments should not depend on who is making them, they should stand for themselves.

Your reasoning sounds to me a bit like the (common) argument that a bicyclist that is injured by a car and then complains that the roads aren't accommodating bicycles shouldn't be taken seriously because he didn't wear a helmet, and everyone knows that bicycling is dangerous. Whether or not he should wear a helmet as a precaution doesn't change the fact that bicyclists have a basic right to argue that they should not be subject to this risk.