I suspect most people who have been trolling Adam and the sidechain developers have ulterior motives. They probably either hold large Alt coin hoards, are part of alt coin development teams or have other vested interests that the sidechain project would directly compete with/make redundant.
You can't lump me into this generalization. Anyone who had followed this thread for the mere 3.5 years of its existence knows I'm an altcoin and Bitcoin 2.0 hater as I believe they're sucking badly needed capital away from Bitcoin temporally. Doesn't mean I don't think they have a right to compete fairly by not bring able to change Bitcoins source code.
The spv verify opcode looks to me like to me to be in the class of a generically useful inclusions which anyone is free to use for a variety of developments or optimizations of existing developments.
Do you suppose that anyone involved with Bitcoin dev had any ideas or involvement in efforts which could have made use pay-to-script-hash when it was integrated? I don't remember you pitching a bitch about that.
I'm sure we are going to hear howls of rage from you if/when there is call for a hard-fork to raise the transaction rate cap because someone involved in Bitcoin dev might also have involvement in a tangential effort which might benefit by increased transaction rates. Right?
A reasonable hypothesis explaining the resistance to sidechains is that the failure of crufty old Satoshi-esque code and ad-hoc unencapsulated network transport is actually a very desirable thing to some and the trajectory of their strategy depends on it. Sidechains could extend the life expectancy of ad-hoc collection of unencumbered organic solutions.