In my discussions with various members of Core, I have reached the conclusion that most of them simply disagree with the design of Bitcoin, which by design allows the consensus rules to be changed by a sufficient majority of miners and users, independent of what any group of technocrats wish.
It is important to remember not to attribute malice where ignorance is equally explanatory. All of the devs I engage with are very strong in cryptography and computer science, which may make them less accepting of the fact that at its core, Bitcoin relies in the economic self-interest of the masses to govern consensus, not a group of educated technocrats. As an educated technocrat myself I can understand the sentiment. It would be better if math and only math governed Bitcoin. But that's not how Bitcoin is actually governed.
At the end of the day, if social engineering and developer manipulation can kill Bitcoin, well then we're all betting on the wrong horse.
That's a good quote here. In fact this governance problem not only happens on bitcoin, but any kind of large scale social community. That's why politics always exists. Notice that politics does not exist on gold since no one can change its property, but bitcoin's protocol is destined to struggle
You have several genius/technocrats each promoting different future plan, and majority of normal users would not be able to understand the pros and cons of those plans. So it finally ends up with politics, e.g. the solution who gain the most support wins, not the most brilliant solution wins. So trying to prove that you are most brilliant does not help to win the vote, instead you must try to study what is voters' favorite
In this case, what majority of uses want? Trust and stability. They might be willing to pay a little bit higher fee or use other off-chain services for daily small transactions, but they definitely don't want to see a split in the core devs and even strange forks that might destroy the whole ecosystem. When bitcoin worth nothing, all its function becomes useless, so to preserve its value is the highest priority here, and in order to do that you must give up on certain functionality