Gav Thorpe
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Gav Thorpe is a dude in GW's development department. He is the one largely responsible for the grand mother bull moose of all mixed blessings that was the Codex: Chaos Space Marines 4th edition Codex. This codex was a huge subject of RAGE and winDread, compartmentalized in one work that has drawn both many supporters - and many completely justified haters.
He has since moved into writing for Black Library, working on almost everything that has anything to do with the Eldar (most notably the Path of the Eldar trilogy). Generally his writing hasn't been too bad, although it's nowhere near as good as their more prominent writers Bullshit, his Slaves to Darkness series for Warhammer Fantasy shits all over anything anyone has written for 40K. [Come on, he's the guy behind the gloriously bad and cheesy ending to Storm of Chaos! The guy was terrible at the time, and he's shown a very erratic understanding of even the most "historical" characters of Fantasy, as well as a sense of mystery, which others like Ward also seem lo lack]
He also wrote the 6th edition Hordes of Chaos book for Warhammer Fantasy, which was full of win and good fluffwise. So fuck the faggots who don't like him. Oh, and he was also the Loremaster for Warhammer Fantasy before he went freelance. So fuck him.
Gav also wrote the script for the Warhammer Fantasy game -- Warhammer: Mark of Chaos.
Also tops the list of writing for 10 year olds in the field of Dark Angels fiction. Consistently pumping out green power armoured garbage in perhaps the worst BL series since James Swallow tried to crown himself King of shit writing with his Blood Angels series.
He does have questionable/poor displays of writing in his work in Fantasy; such as his infamous views on elves "there are as many elves as the plot demands. In one story they can write off the death of a million, but in the next the death of a hundred is a tragedy, but they will always be a dying race (with no word on how the High Elves or Dark Elves replenish their numbers for these huge wars with each other)." This is not a place of logic or consistency. This is to say nothing of his requirement that Elves retain the traits of the Eldar (souls eaten by Slaanesh, never worship Chaos) and need to retcon anything that doesn't fit his very 40k-centric view of Warhammer lore.
The odd thing out that he is praised for is his Warhammer Fantasy Dwarf writing, including the much beloved 6th edition army book and Grudgelore.
Why the Controversy?
Because while his whiny faggot sentimentality may work when writing about pussy-ass Elves, he applies the same methodology to the Dark Angels and Raven Guard. Corax can thank Thorpe for the distinction of being the only Primarch to fucking cry(incorrect, Rogal cried at the near death of the Emperor). Thorpe was basically that morose emo kid who cuts himself and never grew out of it.
Mostly, it's because the very characterful and developed army lists of the previous Codex: CSM were replaced with much-more-generic-flavor army lists. Whilst the codex can undeniably support many forces much better now and is considerably more-balanced from a crunch standpoint un-fucking-usable than some of what the previous Codex brought to the table in terms of bullshit (+5 points for +1 I awesome possum noise marines!), It also completely raped anything regarding ability regarding the variant legions, threw its unconscious body out a window and removed all options for viable weapons. If you were running a Night Lords stealth army, Iron Warriors warband with additional heavy support, Alpha Legion cult strike force, you would find that the new rules simply don't give much to let you keep playing the way you originally did. Hell if you played a normal chaos army your troops are all now fucking useless. Raptors and Obliterators are no longer hard-capped, but special rules for Word Bearer champions, Iron Warriors Warsmiths, and Alpha Legion cultists are all completely absent. Faction-specific armies didn't suffer anywhere near as much - except in one critical role:
Daemons.
Chaos lost all faction-and-Chaos-specific Daemons, and any army that relied on them (especially the Word Bearers, which could field more than any other force), either for fluff reasons or crunch reasons (and pretty much all the Daemons were viable at one point or another in 3rd) was completely and utterly screwed. CSM didn't even get to keep the Chaos Undivided Furies, for fuck's sake. Chaos also lost Greater Daemons of all stripes, and all we got in exchange were GENERIC DAEMON PACK and GENERIC GREATER DAEMON, which whilst they can be useful (many players made GOOD use of them during official tournaments), are nothing but a pale shadow of what used to be available to Chaos Space Marines.
Why did Chaos lose them? Because Gav Thorpe decided that the Daemons needed their own Codex and update. By and large, players refer to most of the new Daemon models that followed this Codex to be fail; the new "one boob only" Daemonettes are absolutely fail-tastic compared to the lithe and graceful-looking ones of the previous edition.
The crunch is also a mixed bag. There's a lot of Craptastic things in the new codex too - Updated Sucktastic Chaos Lords, much Diminished setups using the Chaos Mark system, and more. Sadly, this is quite the anal rape for what we lost (their complaining is quite valid). So whilst this may be a mulligan on Thorpe's part (He's really a bad codex writer and did fuck up most codices to this scale before the eyes of many and the since; his involvement in 'Nids was light and Robin Cruddance took that opportunity to nerf the shit out of them, but that really wasn't Thorpe's fault), Chaos Players forevermore will continue to loathe his very existence and long to drag his soul screaming to the Warp when his time is finally up.
Most fa/tg/uys tacitly agree that he should probably stick to writing for Black Library, as opposed to codices- or that would have been the agreement until the coming of you-know-who...
Update: Matt Ward recently wrote the Iyanden mini-dex. Which has them win their battles, which is something Gav can't even do. However the Supplement also writes Iyanden as being incompetent assholes who didn't even listen to ELDRAD when he stopped by to warn them of their Tyranid-chow future, in a rare example of him not being a dick. I'd call it even.
Where he stands as of 5th Edition Grey Knights Codex
Much of /tg/ has decided that Matthew Ward is infinitely worse than this guy can ever hope to be. He hasn't mutilated the canon, he didn't FANBOY OVERPOWER anything except Chaos in Warhammer Fantasy, and he's been around long enough not to do anything too horrendously stupid instead he made an entire army invalid. Plus, the man can write at over a special Pre School for rocks level, unlike a certain other writer. There are some that belive him to be worse than ward as his codices or more than not, at least somewhat playable, whereas Thorpe's books strip the associated army of its flavour.
As a BL writer, his obsession with the space elves seems to be connected with a near-total lack of understanding of how they work, with his Path of the Eldar novels' plots requiring practically everyone on Alaitoc to be a drooling imbecile to work and going on bizarre tangents about how Khaine is supposedly related to Khorne. You'd think someone so insistent on writing a given faction would at least have their facts straight about them and not make them all look like emotionally stunted retards.
He's also one half of the Kyme-Thorpe law which states 'all Dark angel and salamander books must be shit.'