DeathAndTaxes was an awesome guy and I miss his presence in the online Bitcoin community.  When I was learning about Bitcoin, I would regularly read every comment he would write, hoping to suck up some of his wisdom.  Gerald is that rare gem who can understand technical topics at their full depth, who is learned in a breadth of fields beyond tech, and who is a brilliant writer and communicator.


I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around why you appear to be acting hostile towards me.  

I am not an XT'er, by the way; I simply want to see both larger block sizes and multiple implementations of the protocol.  By supporting XT, I support that objective. If XT doesn't take off but we get bigger blocks and start to deprecate Core some other way, I'd be pleased with that outcome too.

What is so wrong with making it easier for the community to express their free choice by giving them more options?  If development indeed does decentralize as per the animation below, how is that a bad thing?