But you have to look at the totality of the situatio.
Imo, Gavin is working from a much higher level of moral authority than gmax. He's employed by a non profit. Sure, he may be in the coinbase advisory board or something like that but unlike gmax he isn't CEO of a for profit company funded by a bunch of late comers who previously shunned Bitcoin.
I've got $21M that says I'm right.
Gavin gets up in front of a crowd of Silicon Valley VC types for the 'state of the union' thing and the first words out of his mouth are the standard 'need to innovate or die' tripe.
Gavin pulls in $200k/yr from a 'non-profit' that he and Vassenes (who seemed to have popped out of the ether to lead a lot of things) put together. That group (the Bitcoin Foundation) counts as it's members a whole bunch of people who are almost certainly simple thieves and dopey criminals. The attrition off it's board of directors from arrests and prosecutions is stunning.
Gavin seems to be the only guy who is paid specifically to do things to Bitcoin. Garzik is paid by Bitpay, but as near as I can see the work he does on Bitcoin and his philosophies and judgements don't seem to have changed a lot and a lot of the don't seem to align with the interests of his employer.
Maxwell and ~sipa are among the most productive and skilled of the Bitcoin devs, and Back has a long history in the space which pre-dates Bitcoin. Maxwell is publicly visible and I've never detected anything he's said which indicated that he was in any way non-genuine. Since I've been watching the commits back in 2011, ~sipa has seemed to be the principle architect of Bitcoin. Hired by Google long after he became a key part of Bitcoin, worked for them briefly then apparently quit maybe around the time a preponderance of the most important of the core developers formed some sort of a grouping as Blockstream.
I am fairly certain that if Blockstream passed themselves off as a 'non-profit' (which is pretty meaningless as a label these days) people who have some reason to be threatened by their goals for Bitcoin would rail on them for not being sufficiently free-market or some other nonsense.
I'll withhold judgement on Blockstream in operation until I see first hand how transparent they are in their operations and production of code and so forth. I am as hopeful for them in these regards as I have been of any effort on the basis of who's involved. It speaks well for the organization that the likes of Maxwell and Back take some time to interact with the community and in the same open and honest manner that they have done before Blockstream was formed.