I think freeformsschooler and I might be talking about different things.
Let me be clear though, Hicks is a polished PR man and would never directly badmouth anybody publishing FATE material. Having followed his blog, twitter, and G+ feeds though, I can say that he used to really try to distance himself and pointedly never said anything positive about McConnell, the SoF guy. I the subtext was that he didnt like what he was doing with the brand, but thats all inference.
Also, he pretty loudly shutdown a few forum posts where people were talking about not needing Adjectives for skill ratings and just using numbers because they found it easier to play that way. I cant find them now, but basically some dude was asking "are adjectives really needed in any fate game, and would it sometimes be easier to just use the numbers" and Fred came back with "whats not needed is you suggesting..." and really tore into the dude.
Lastly, he blathers a lot. just a personal peeve, but I dont find his statements to be very content rich and have stopped following his stuff.
Is any of that a big deal? Probably not. But he does rub me the wrong way. should it stop you from reading his stuff? probably not. should it influence your buying decision? no.
The kickstarter is definitely worth a buck to get an early look at the PDF. It's probably worth $10 bucks to get all of the content if youre a FATE GM, I know its worth it to me. It might be worth more if you're the sort of person who still buys physical books, but I have too much clutter as it is.
But some people really get excited about backing this KS stuff and contributing to small companies, so really its worth whatever amount of money you feel good about having paid.
Sort of like Bay12Games, really. Worth however much you feel good about paying.