I find Tim Gowers' "two cultures" distinction to be relevant here. PDE does not have a general theory, but it does have a general set of principles and methods (e.g. continuity arguments, energy arguments, variational principles, etc.).

Sergiu Klainerman's "PDE as a unified subject" discusses this topic fairly exhaustively.

Any given system of PDE tends to have a combination of ingredients interacting with each other, such as dispersion, dissipation, ellipticity, nonlinearity, transport, surface tension, incompressibility, etc. Each one of these phenomena has a very different character. Often the main goal in analysing such a PDE is to see which of the phenomena "dominates", as this tends to determine the qualitative behaviour (e.g. blowup versus regularity, stability versus instability, integrability versus chaos, etc.) But the sheer number of ways one could combine all these different phenomena together seems to preclude any simple theory to describe it all. This is in contrast with the more rigid structures one sees in the more algebraic sides of mathematics, where there is so much symmetry in place that the range of possible behaviour is much more limited. (The theory of completely integrable systems is perhaps the one place where something analogous occurs in PDE, but the completely integrable systems are a very, very small subset of the set of all possible PDE.)

p.s. The remark Qiaochu was referring to was Remark 16 of this blog post.