I suspect that laughing out loud was not the reaction they were looking for
From Serious Straw Bale (Lacinski & Bergeron): "The biggest danger with gypsum plaster, in our opinion, is that it is so light and smooth that it takes some doing to not smooth all of the character out of the bale walls."
I'd say this is a feature unless you really want to live in something that looks like a whitewashed cave.
One of the really odd things about the whole strawbale community is that they've got a pretty serious case of modern design syndrome, in that it's not good enough to have a well-constructed house built with renewable materials, but you've got to flaunt your more-earthy-crunchy-than-thou attitudes, and things like usability need to take a backseat to the attitude. There are reasons for flat smooth walls -- you can easily hang pictures from them, they don't pick up dust bunnies, they are easy to clean -- and tossing this over in favor of some hypothetical character (irregular walls! It's either strawbale or a really bad plastering job! whoopee!) might have something to do with strawbale not becoming a really popular scavenging technology.
And, shoot, if you want your plaster walls to have character, all you need to do is wait 90 years and they'll have all the character you can eat. Just look at any conventional house, particularly one that has spent most of its life attempting to lunge into a river.
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This need to flaunt their “alternative legitimacy” reminds me of people who “haven’t owned a TV in 10 years” and who make sure to let everyone else know that they “haven’t owned a TV in 10 years”.