My worry here is that we seem to have a large cadre of proponents of this new feature that are not able to articulate answers to reasonable questions. I see a lot of demurring of the nature of "perhaps the devs can come by and explain it better". It makes be think that perhaps these proponents likewise don't understand the details of what is being proposed deeply enough to understand the implications upon the questions being asked.
Exactly. If a solution is not understandable for users with average IT expertise, then it will never be understandable for anyone with even less IT knowledge. And typically owners of large mining farms and exchanges do not have time to do those learning, so they tends to select the solution that they can understand or listen to people they like. This will turn the decision making into politics, and who are good at lobbying and PR will push in their changes. And this is not people would like to see in bitcoin. So, the knowledge gap of different participants decided that you really can't reach a wide consensus upon a radical or complex solution, XT's failure already proved that
I still don't really understand how that can be implemented as a soft fork. Softfork means backward compatible, when the upgraded SW clients broadcast new blocks through out the network, how come the original core client can accept such kind of strange block which does not contain signature data?