eskimum - expressing an opinion is fine - it's what MN is for. As long as you accept that it's your opinion only, that doesn't make it 'right', and that with many of these thorny issues like childcare there is absolutely no clear consistent evidence on the subject. As Jackaroo notes, we can all point to anecdotes, but they don't prove any hard evidence one way or the other.
'Nursery bashing' is when a poster uses invidious methods, making comments such as 'I didn't have children for someone else to bring them up' ... (a quote from this trhead!)- it's offensive, because the intention is to undermine parents who use childcare.
Personally I think that too many women use such methods to try to justify their own decisions, which is a shame. Why can't they just say, 'This is what I did, it worked for me, each to their own?'
My own personal opinion is that I wouldn't be keen to use a nursery for long hours for a young baby, but that doesn't mean to say people who do are wrong. Although I returned to work after maternity leaves, I worked part time while my children were under 5 so that I could be home more, and guess what? It was because I wanted to, not because I thought it was 'better' for them in any way. Partly my reasoning is that I'm not the world's most organised person and I wasn't sure I'd cope brilliantly with F/T work and very young children, and partly because at that stage in my life it was quite pleasant to spend some of the week pottering around at home doing kiddie stuff. But I wouldn't try to justify my decision by saying 'Oh of course I only worked P/T because it was better for the kids'. How the hell would I know anyway - chances are they would have turned out just the same had I worked more hours or less! They are older now, and are bright, confident, sometimes stroppy... in other words NORMAL!! The other thing that's worth saying here is that when second dc came along, my DH actually began to feel that I was having a bit too much of the fun, and he rearranged his working hourse for a couple of years so that he was at home more (which meant me working more hours). I thought that was great. And once the children were in school, we were both able to slip back up to F/T hourse which again suits us all fine.
The point I'm making, is that actually none of us can say with absolute certainty that we have done the 'right' thing with our children, because we can't know how they would have turned out if we'd done things differently. All we can do is make decisions which feel right for us at the time, and being 100% honest, most mothers who stop working or go down to part time do it exactly for the reasons that I did - because they want to do it, not because they have any cast iron evidence that it's better for their kids. I also know a number of women who didn't particularly like the job they were doing anyway, so choose to stay home after having a baby - so in these cases again, they're not necessarily staying home because they think it's best for the child, they're doing it because they didn't like their job!! Plus there are all those women who may want to work but can't because they don't earn enough to cover childcare (been a few of those threads recently).
Stay at home if you want, work part time if you want, work full time if you want, and choose the childcare that suits YOUR family, whether it's CM, nursery or nanny. Just don't use the decision you chose to try to denigrate other people's choices.