Gavin's allusion to Greg overextending himself is an example of his pragmatism and balance. Gavin made choices based on being able to deliver, not based on what is ideal. My successes have come from being more like Gavin. My failures have come from being more like Greg.
Fundamentally, Gavin has assigned himself this problem. He is diligently canvassing and curating opinions on the problems and methods of resolving them.
It can be frustrating work, but it is fully necessary.
He is getting a lot of help in this effort so it is not merely a contest of wills and personalities. Also...Both Greg and Gavin are on the same team and not opposed, though their weighting of the priority of tasks may differ, so it is not really so much a matter of winner/loser.
My big picture is morphing. I now see that Bitcoin is approaching fragility due to reaching complexity and scaling constraints and there are no good solutions. Gavin is pushing for the simplest solution to retain scaling of transactions. Gregory is pushing for more time to develop their "solution" of pegged side chains, hoping that will offload some of the pressure on block size increases. Blockstream proponents have an incentive to keep the block size small enough that there is an incentive to try their pegged side chains. Gavin's proposal is more pragmatic and direct, but not if it requires breaking the consensus with a new full node code base (but I suspect he introduced this as an intentional Red Herring to encourage capitulation and compromise).
I don't see any of it working long-term. Bitcoin is eventually falling into the lap of the corporations in the space who will take over as the decentralized morass implodes. TPTB are subsuming Bitcoin from every facet (regulation, capturing the masses in online wallets, Sybil attacking the pools, 21 Inc strategy to monopolize mining economics, etc).
Perhaps Steve Jobs greatest skill was in identifying scaling constraints. Here is an example of
what Steve taught my former boss.