It shouldn't need years of engineering studies to understand that there's no real technical discussion going on between the various sub-camps in the developer's camp.
So your take is that devs are going full "political" rather than technical? (serious question)
If yes, what's the way to unlock this
impasse?
Given the deadlock, I honestly start to think it might be good to do a 'divorce'. As in, we actually agree to disagree, and all see that there are fundamentally incompatible opinions with regards to the direction of Bitcoin. But we can keep it friendly. This might be less damage/cost than having a hardfork battle solving it in January 2016.
That way we can avoid the fighting and truly let the market work out the rest. We divide up the common assets of the web sites, code repos etc. between Bitcoin/QT and Bitcoin/XT. Make it clear that Bitcoin is now two Bitcoins, and that the user has to decide.
QT and XT simply seem like two people who shouldn't be married. Better have a clean divorce than endless fighting.
Thoughts?
If XT hadn't been a MIke Hearn's creature I would have said 100% yes.
My gut feeling and few facts that I gather along the way (mainly red-listing, but also having decreased dust fee request
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/3305), make me think that way.
But all in all yes, by definition to resolve a deadlock you need to change the policy that have regulated the process since.
I'm still hoping that the situation will be solved without the need of a "schism", though.
Mind you I think that more implementations of the bitcoin protocol (modulo the consensus rules that has to be enforced by
the same library for all the clients) is an healthy thing to have, but that's not the case unfortunately.