I think what VeritasSapere is getting at is that Bitcoin's greatest point of centralization is presently Development:

< bunch of non sense zipped >

Solex made in interesting observation here:  Node count has actually increased with the release of Bitcoin-XT.  If we had even more competing clients to choose from, perhaps we would see a further increase in node count as people ran nodes to express the vote for the direction the protocol should take.  In my opinion this would be a very big positive because it could simultaneously increase node count AND decrease development centralization around Core.  

I don't know whether engaging people who are happy to present such willfully dishonest arguments is genuinely productive in the long term. It suggests that these people and the arguments are worth addressing. Unfortunately the dishonest arguments cannot be separated from the others of a single participant, but we could separate those participants who use dishonest strategies from the debate. I don't address them.