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 win, compartmentalized in one work that has drawn both many supporters - and many completely justified haters.
He is also famous for writing practically every Eldar codex and everything that has anything to do with the Eldar. He will fight to the death for the right to write an Eldar Codex or Eldar-viewpoint novel. But even his love of the Eldar doesn't stop him from hopping onto the Eldar are the whipping-boys-of-the-Warhammer-multiverse bandwagon, as the Eldar can't win even in his latest Codex.
Gav also wrote the script for the Warhammer Fantasy game -- Warhammer: Mark of Chaos.
Why the Controversy?
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 (incredibly shitty) 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 (which was THE ENTIRE FUCKING POINT OF THE DAMNED THINGS, THEY'RE DAEMONS OF SLAANESH, THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO BE SIMULTANEOUSLY HIDEOUS AND BEAUTIFUL, STOP RUINING SHIT GAMES WORKSHOP)
* Emperor's Children Marine is forced away from the Keyboard by a rather jaded-looking Thousand Sons Sorcerer *
Like was said earlier - total mixed bag. There's a lot of good things in the new codex too - Vindicators for not-Iron Warriors, Updated defilers, improved Chaos Lords, much-improved setups using the Chaos Mark system, and more. Sadly, this isn't quite on-level for what we lost in the eyes of many (and their complaining is quite valid). So whilst this may be a mulligan on Thorpe's part (He's really not a bad codex writer and didn't fuck up any Codex to this scale before or 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 Codexes - or that would have been the agreement until the coming of you-know-who...
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, and he's been around long enough not to do anything to 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.
He is not C.S. Goto