Looking again at the McIntosh article, I don't think his first sentence (assuming the reference is to the "Choke" section of the piece) was an attempt to stir the pot at all. Rather, it was in anticipation of the strong reaction he'd get from those who didn't agree with him. And we can see in this discussion that there's no shortage of people who disagree when it comes to straight cylinder.
But if you're mainly a duck and dove hunter, you're not his target audience anyhow. Pheasant, grouse and woodcock, quail . . . I've already addressed pheasants--which, at least in my experience, require less choke (and, for that matter, lighter loads) than most people use. A lot of people go to South Dakota and end up hunting the birds in very large groups. Group hunts tend to make for longer shots than if it's just a couple of hunters following a good dog or two.
Grouse and woodcock: I doubt anyone who's hunted doodles much would disagree with cylinder for them. But Steve Smith, in an excellent little book called "The Whispering Wings of Autumn", which he and the late Gene Hill did for the Ruffed Grouse Society, refers to the average distance at which he shot woodcock over several seasons: 13 yards for first barrel kills, 19 yards for second barrels. Smith hunts grouse mostly in Michigan. Veteran outdoor writer Nick Sisley hunts them mostly in Pennsylvania--thus covering the two major regions of the country where ruffs are hunted. Smith's average distance to grouse: 22 yards first barrel, 28 yards second. Sisley, reporting on a season in which he bagged 33 grouse while shooting 78% (which he admits was unusual!) gave his average kill distance at 23 yards. That was with a Franchi AL-48 20ga auto with the barrel cut off to remove all choke. Those distances line up well with the range at which we break skeet targets, which should not come as a surprise when we recall that skeet was a game invented as off-season practice by William Harnden Foster and some of his grouse hunting friends.
Quail . . . it's been too long since I've encountered good numbers of wild birds. But I did have a couple good trips to TX, back before the weather went to heck and their birds crashed. While I didn't measure the distance to dead birds, I'd be surprised if I killed many any farther away than 25 yards.
So while not all of us can live without choke for all of our upland hunting, I think quite a few of us can. The Fox Sterlingworth 20ga I plan to use for grouse and woodcock is already quite open, choked close to skeet 1 and 2. And I'll use spreaders in the right barrel to open it even more. Early grouse and woodcock are typically "shoot close or not at all" because they're quickly out of sight in the heavy leaf canopy, and--liking to eat both--I don't want to blow them to pieces.
