Apologies for thinking you were in that camp originally defending MP. ...
I'm pretty independent. I've been reading the bitcoin-assets stuff and would say that some of my conceptions are a startling mirror of what they are up to so it would be fair to consider me 'in their camp'. I don't know what the MP crew's actual driving motivations are so I cannot really go to bat for them. I like what I see though.
Actually, in my mind the union of a defensible Bitcoin backing healthy sidechains ecosystem is where I really see value. I've got nothing to do with the Blockstream guys either, but it would be even more appropriate to consider me as 'in their camp'. Again, it's really the symbiosis of the two efforts where I really see a future worth working towards. Success of either effort is a positive, but the combination would be, in my mind, a home run and may be tenable.
What makes you think side chains are real? They have all the earmarks of a vaporware funding scam. They have no analogy in other commodities or services. Immutable pegging can't exist in the real world because there is no logic to it. Supply and demand is decentralized and real, pegging is a unicorn. Nothing in real life is truly two-way pegged. Government made pegs are always broken.
First and foremost, I have developed a great deal of confidence in certain of the more visible (and less visible) people involved over the years. Maxwell, Wuille, and Back in particular, but also most of the others that I know of. And, unlike most of the multitude of other efforts, I already trust these very people with my Bitcoin value anyway. They are, after all, Bitcoin core contributors and among the most prolific.
Secondly, the basic idea of sidechains hit me right away. Actually, the lack of realistic scaling and inefficiency of transaction flooding hit me as I was reading the whitepaper and as I thought about a solution, the general idea of subordinate chains was one of the first thing I imagined.
Thirdly, there is little reason that I see why they could not be made to work, and integrated into the native Bitcoin ecosystem safely and easily (unlike 'treechains' which I like even better.) The general principles of the combination of mathematical soundness and open-source which make Bitcoin work are equally applicable (potentially) to the two-way-peg. I doubt that it will be rocket science, or even especially complex. And it won't be some corner-case effort with code that nobody is looking at.