if XT is officially dead, what will be the role of Gavin and Hearn, friend or foe ?
XT remains a valid implementation of bitcoin as long as its 75%-vote-fork-thingy doesn't happen.
So, they'll basically just be two developers of another implementation.
Since it will not reach the 75% threshold and the blocksize debate is solved, why they would continue working on XT ?
There should be more than one implementation of the bitcoin protocol.
Also, there might be legitimate use cases for "enterprise" style full nodes etc.
I could think of a thousand reasons why XT could be useful, but the most important ones will likely be the ones I can't imagine right now.