But I think the point here is that many people believe (and interpret the whitepaper as stating) that a plethora of different implementations with regular post-fork swarming to a new consensus is actually the natural state of Bitcoin.

The idea that consensus means pre-fork agreement is wrong (as pre-fork agreement is impossible in a trustless decentralized system).

I believe the recent XT events should be the norm; new implementations being released, and standing or falling on their merits in the community, with regularity.

I think that while a lot of the "team XT" stuff was nonsense and dangerous, I think that the deliberate slowing of the blocksizes by those people with an apparent anti-competitive commercial incentive to do so, is FAR more dangerous and insidious.

If Bitpay came out and said; "we've created BIP111 and are suggesting people who like adoption run it, as we need it to process zero confirmation transactions to reduce fraud and increase adoption, so we can make money and grow" than at least that's honesty. What's going on at Blockstream is much more subtle, and much more disingenuous.

The only way that we can break this cycle of BS is for multiple parties to be developing (as they are) and the community to be accepting and rejecting CODE not PEOPLE.