Thank you for apologising Bear that takes courage.
You won't have been the only person thinking what you said (and indeed what others said - some of whom definitely seemed intent on purely upsetting others) and I can see why. I think it does illustrate a more general issue with weather communication, not just here but in the States and Europe.
I think the issue is two fold.
The first is that although weather modelling is in general very good - this storm was forecast extremely well long before it started forming - it does have limitations. A small tweak in starting conditions for a storm, or in the conditions as it evolves, makes an impact on what people see on the ground. It is really hard to convey that it is about probabilities. ie. How probable is a particular event. People are naturally drawn to absolutes, they need them to plan and live everyday life, but forecasting isn't absolute.
The met office attempt to do this with their warning system. As you can see - a red warning is only issued when an event is both extremely severe and extremely likely.
This is why they held off from the red in the south and SE until the early hours of yesterday. The amber warning was one below the red, but they needed to be certain as red warnings are intended to trigger the sort of actions that many, but not all, organisations took. As you can see, it is an impact matrix.
70-80 mph winds on an isolated coast don't cause the same sort of impact as the same winds in a densely populated area. So what might not seem like extreme winds, can have extreme impacts. Especially when it's very rare to have winds of that level, in inland areas, for a sustained time during the day.
The second problem is without a doubt the tabloids. They take met office and other forecasters forecasts and utterly mangle them and amplify the potential worst scenarios. Where do you go with an event like yesterday when every winter some of the tabloids scream multiple about killer storms and snowmaggedon? They are directly responsible for blunting people's response to severe weather forecasts. I feel fury at them sometimes.
I'm sorry for the essay! What I'm trying to say, is that it is no wonder many people struggled to hear the message yesterday. You won't have been alone.