The reality is that the former XT supporters are the people who are in desperate need of a monetary despot; you can't paint unilateral forks any other way than exactly that.
Are there that many people that need a monetary despot, or could it be that some people simply agree on these particulars?
I don't like some features of Gavin's plan because it has too much guesswork where decisions are made today that affect far future.
So I won't run a lot of XT nodes, but maybe just one.
The gmax BIP 100 mechanism is superior in that it allows these decisions to be made closer to the time when they matter. It also decentralizes the decisions. Gavin's proposals hadn't progressed yet to the BIP stage, they are still in the spaghetti on the wall phase, so discussing block size increases in Bitcoin Core should be discussing BIP 100.