I'm kind of alarmed at the false equivalence you're drawing between all possible changes. That bogus, and I know you know it.

When you're talking about a compact intentional delta you can reason about the exposure; you might fail, you might not. Normally it wouldn't make sense to do this on the balance of the costs.

The _ability_ to do something is important; it's a functional check and balance even if you don't actually pull the trigger on it or if you find those changes are just helpfully welcomed in.  When the consensus is potentially bifurcated without someone doing something awful it reduces the pressure to maintain homogenity as a justification to not deploy features which are harmful to a minority ("let them run their own nodes, and see if anyone cares").
 
There is no "the official" anything in Bitcoin.

There is no escaping that we must care about implementations even run by a small number of people. If something happens in the network that harms them its a harm for all of us.  Outsiders rightfully do not judge Bitcoin for this implementation vs that implementation. We're all in this together.