I'm going to have to agree with Sven. I have a lot of respect for you ewwhite, particularly since you guided me away from taking the wrong behavior hints from the rest of the community when I was a newbie, but I think this is a good opportunity for me to return the favor.
Putting aside my own (less than favorable) opinions of Hans Reiser, I think you're letting emotions get in the way of your usual rationality.
- The content is of questionable taste and adds no value. It's the classic "face only a mother could love" treatment. True, it can be interpreted as entertaining by your intended audience, and one could argue that it's meant in fun and not intended to be taken too seriously. Objectively however, it's an opinion about someone's physical appearance being used to weigh on their trustworthiness. It adds no objective facts to the discussion.
- The comment associated with the rollback is well-justified:
stay technical, mofos. - We are agreed that edit wars on old questions provide little value in and of themselves. That said, the content being disputed is the sort where I personally 1) would have anticipated the possibility of a poor reception, and 2) just let it go once that happened. Even if it was years later.
- Once you rolled the answer back, the correct course of action for this person should have been to take the topic to meta as you have done. That was the only disrespect I see on their part.
- As much as I personally derive no offense from the original answer, objectively I must condede that your original answer can rightly be interpreted as disrespectful as well. I'm no fan of the Cult of Sensitivity, but I'd have to concede the point here.
In short, your original intent was fairly harmless but I think you need to let it go. I don't equate this with pointless editing of old content, such as converting punctuation over to Unicode. This was not worth holding the line on.