Well, there is someone on this board who has a 250w metal halide system over a 10 gallon tank. He might be able to shine some more light on a MH system over a smaller tank question.
It's not that you are disliked. I tend to look at it like this. On this board, the
SW community is very very small and not everyone has all the answers. So sometimes it can take a week to get an answer. Sometimes no one knows as they don't have any experience with it, in those cases you normally don't see an answer. So, it's not that people don't like someone, it's that they don't know they answer so they avoid posting frivolously and potentially de-railing a thread.
I tend to do a lot of googling and looking through a couple forums that are specifically for reef keeping before blanket posting the same question to, normally, 3 different website forums. That way, if I cannot find an answer myself there is normally about 1000 people looking at my question and sometimes there still isn't an answer. :P