> If the term is flexible, why the hard reaction to my flexing of it?
The terminology is not flexible, it has a well established meaning. If your bar for a black hat includes legitimate security researchers disclosing vulnerabilities in a way you don't like, you've just expanded the group of people we can call "black hats" almost arbitrarily. You're putting security researchers you have a normative disagreement with into the same group of people who commit actual fraud, steal identities and sell your credit card data.
The terminology is not flexible, it has a well established meaning. If your bar for a black hat includes legitimate security researchers disclosing vulnerabilities in a way you don't like, you've just expanded the group of people we can call "black hats" almost arbitrarily. You're putting security researchers you have a normative disagreement with into the same group of people who commit actual fraud, steal identities and sell your credit card data.