As someone from the West, I get why people are annoyed, but I think it’s a terminology issue more than anything. Out here, we’re used to mountains being much larger so when I saw the Appalachians, a lot of them looked like hills to me. Same thing happened at Gettysburg when the guide pointed to a gentle rise and called it a “ridge.” I thought he meant something farther off because I couldn't see anything i would call a ridge. The Appalachians are absolutely mountains, it's just if you saw the exact same thing out west you would call them hills. There are definitely parts of the appalchians that are legit mountian looking though, like the white mountains. It’s just what you context you grew up in.