Watched the French-Stuckey debate. My main takeaway: The whole debate centered upon a truth-emotion continuum. I think Allie Beth came out ahead for one main reason that colors every issue debated: She indexes her understanding of emotion and empathy on a biblical axis, whereas French elevates emotion and empathy to a disproportionate degree. The consequence is to unmoor emotion from truth. There's simply a difference in rhetorical strategy: Stuckey focuses more on logos; French on pathos. Along those lines, another reason I think Allie Beth had the stronger hand is that she refuses to play the game of pitting love against truth (1 Cor. 13:6; Eph. 4:15). She's no less interested in kindness or empathy, but properly indexed by Scripture. French's focus on catering to emotional equilibrium (and thus hewing to progressive niceties) requires him to blur biblical categories.
Biblical ethics requires both logos and pathos, but our loves must be ordered and governed with a proper foundation. And notably, French's empathy tends in one direction, toward those to his left.
In short, Allie Beth focused on objectivity, reason, and right and wrong as the grounds of what constitutes love and kindness, whereas French's instinct is to defer to emotion and aesthetics.