Remember this quote by Adam when the time comes that they make their proposal to change the Bitcoin protocol to enable LN and SCs.
As you can probably tell I think a unilateral fork without wide-scale consensus from the technical and business communities is a deeply inadvisable.
The bar to add LN and SC enabling protocol changes is wide-scale consensus. If a small number of participants disagree, it doesn't happen by their own logic. Additionally these protocol changes significantly change what Bitcoin fundamentally is much more than a simple 20MB blocksize change.
Something tells me though that their tune will be different then.
Edit: I think this comment by Mike sums up the need here.
If Bitcoin runs out of capacity *it will break and many of our users will leave*. That is not an acceptable outcome for myself or the many other wallet, service and merchant developers who have worked for years to build an ecosystem around this protocol.
Mike is pointing out that Bitcoin is the entire ecosystem, not just the development board. In fact if you totaled the amount of work and effort put in to build Bitcoin I think it would work out to be less than 1% bitcoin devs and >99% everyone else. There has been a tremendous amount of effort put in to build Bitcoin that goes far beyond and outside of the bitcoin core. But the devs are ignoring that and acting as if Bitcoin is their project and they own it and have put the most amount of work behind it. I think this is telling, and demonstrates the need for systems controlled by users.
your last point is especially pertinent, its the investments made by all the network of users possibly the majority of them have bought and held Bitcoin running up to $1000 and down again, they are the heroes that make the network. The majority of them have been delta a sucker punch, while a small group of Developers feel they have earned the right to decide how to direct the potential $3B experiment we have all bought into.
its not a centralized experiment but a decentralized one, and that applies to the Bitcoin Core.