An excellent piece of sleuthing!

Pullum isn’t reviewing Strunk and White, he’s reviewing recent revisions of their book. Consider what Strunk himself wrote about active v. passive voice:

—————-quote—————-
This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.

The dramatists of the Restoration are little esteemed to-day.

Modern readers have little esteem for the dramatists of the Restoration.

The first would be the right form in a paragraph on the dramatists of the Restoration; the second, in a paragraph on the tastes of modern readers. The need of making a particular word the subject of the sentence will often, as in these examples, determine which voice is to be used.

The habitual use of the active voice, however, makes for forcible writing. This is true not only in narrative principally concerned with action, but in writing of any kind. Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as there is, or could be heard.

There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground.

Dead leaves covered the ground.

The sound of the falls could still be heard.

The sound of the falls still reached our ears.

The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired.

Failing health compelled him to leave college.

It was not long before he was very sorry that he had said what he had.

He soon repented his words
————-endquote—————–

Now, here is what Pullum says about that:

————union————
What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don’t know what is a passive construction and what isn’t. Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses. “At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard” is correctly identified as a passive clause, but the other three are all errors:

“There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground” has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.

“It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had” also contains nothing that is even reminiscent of the passive construction.

“The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired” is presumably fingered as passive because of “impaired,” but that’s a mistake. It’s an adjective here. “Become” doesn’t allow a following passive clause. (Notice, for example, that “A new edition became issued by the publishers” is not grammatical.)
————–endquote————

Note that what Strunk said was:

‘The habitual use of the active voice, however, makes for forcible writing. This is true not only in narrative principally concerned with action, but in writing of any kind. Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as there is, or could be heard.’

Again: ‘a transitive in the active voice’.

I agree. Though I loved the critical review, nevertheless, S&W made me a better writer. Which just goes to show how much room for improvement there was (and no doubt still is).

————-quote————–
opinionated [əˈpɪnjəˌneɪtɪd]
adj

holding obstinately and unreasonably to one’s own opinions; dogmatic
opinionatedly

adv
opinionatedness n
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged 6th Edition 2003. © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003
ThesaurusLegend: Synonyms Related Words Antonyms
Adj. 1. opinionated – obstinate in your opinions
opinionative, self-opinionated
narrow-minded, narrow – lacking tolerance or flexibility or breadth of view; “a brilliant but narrow-minded judge”; “narrow opinions”
————–endquote————–

Please explain how one can be OVERobstinate. OVERunreasonable or OVER dogmatic.

LOL. I wonder how Medawar would have done in British court if Teilhard had decided to sue for libel.

Here are some excerpts from Medawar’s review of Teilhard’s The Phenomenon of Man (Mind, 70, pp. 99-105):

“Yet the greater part of it, I shall show, is nonsense, tricked out with a variety of metaphysical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself.”

“In no sense other than an utterly trivial one is reproduction the inverse of chemical disintegration. It is a misunderstanding of genetics to suppose that reproduction is only ‘intended’ to make facsimiles, for parasexual processes of genetical exchange are to be found in the simplest living things.”

“There is much else in the literary idiom of nature-philosophy: nothing-buttery, for example, always part of the minor symptomatology of the bogus.”

“The Phenomenon of Man stands square in the tradition of Naturphilosophie, a philosophical indoor pastime of German origin which does not seem even by accident (though there is a great deal of it) to have contributed anything of permanent value to the storehouse of human thought.”

“I do not propose to criticize the fatuous argument I have just outlined; here, to expound is to expose.”

“How have people come to be taken in by The Phenomenon of Man? We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of this kind, for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.”

“French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has according resorted to the use of that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.”

“It would have been a great disappointment to me if Vibration did not somewhere make itself felt, for all scientistic mystics either vibrate in person or find themselves resonant with cosmic vibrations; but I am happy to say that on page 266 Teilhard will be found to do so.”

“In spite of all the obstacles that Teilhard perhaps wisely puts in our way, it is possible to discern a train of thought in The Phenomenon of Man.”

Surely taking “too” out of the second sentence makes it much worse. It really removes any connection with the previous sentence. It’s the difference between “I’ve spent too much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way [to toast this little book]” and “I’ve spent much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way [to toast this little book]“.

As for the other changes you made:
1.”Overopinionated” and “opinionated” aren’t synonyms. The first is necessarily pejorative, the latter isn’t.

2.”Uninformed” and “underinformed” are likewise not synonyms.

3. “So” isn’t useless. It acts as intensifier. Even if you prefer the sentence with “so” removed, I’m not sure why you would call it ‘redundant’. Intensifying and pointlessly repeating are, after all, different.

At any rate, the real complaints Pullum made were over fallacious grammar rather than stylistic niceties, so it’s hard to see why it would matter even if your rewriting happened to improve the sentences.