You have a valid argument. My only excuse is that this is the first (publicly available) post-mortem I've written.
The answers to the questions you bring up have enough material for a blog post of their own, so I'll most likely end up doing a follow-up to this blog post where I address them.
I can definitely recommend Jackson. Performance is stellar and it's easy to use.
It does make your APK a bit bigger (in our case, about 20% of the APK size comes from Jackson) so if you're only going to be parsing very little JSON, you can still make do with JSONObject.
Don't take me wrong, I'm not a proponent of being "dumb" with performance either. However, I'm perfectly okay with using the standard libraries like JSONObject & AsyncTask until they prove to be too slow.
Thanks to a decent architecture the usage of JSONObject was confined to just a few methods that had to be refactored. There were a few more AsyncTasks we had to switch out, but in the end the refactoring took about two days which I would find to be perfectly acceptable "losses" compared to researching the performance of every single class before using it.
I definitely see where you're coming from though and I'll be sure to not throw that quote around without a better explanation in the future (at least on HN).
There are a bunch of different solutions to this problem being explored. Being able to give provide location context-specific services in your applications is something that I personally think is going to be a huge thing in the next few years.
My current company is actually providing developers with a service (currently Android only) to provide better location contexts in their apps.
If you're interested you can take a look at our homepage from my profile. We just launched our public beta this week so if this sort of thing interests you as an app developer, please check it out :)