O.k. If we are going to give some kind of meaningful weight to the words of Todd, then even listening to him in the LTB interview, you can also hear him saying that any kind of Hardfork and disagreement is a bad idea to attempt to hardfork with even a few percentage in the minority.
In that regard, even if he is talking about contentiousness in terms of increasing the blocksize limits, he really seems to be asserting the dangers of a hard fork and having people who oppose the hardfork working on the other side of such a hardfork.
So in that regard, even if Todd may be a bit less than artful in the way that he made his claims, he is voicing opposition to a majority forcing some kind of outcome on a minority (thus he is saying something like: "hardforks are dangerous no matter what and we should go through considerable efforts to avoid hardforks, if possible")
What he is really saying is he and Blockstream are blocking a 2MB HF even if everyone else wants one.
They keep saying a HF is bad if a small percentage objects to it.
What they are not saying is they object to it and so the 2MB HF should not happen.
Unfortunately Bitcoin is a democratic system.
I don't think that is what he is saying, and it seems that he is not the only force behind the opposition to either classic or xt or any other attempted at a forced change.
I am not really sure if I agree with your point about bitcoin being democratic as being descriptive of what is going on.
What I keep suggesting and even asserting is that in bitcoin there seems to be a certain momentum and presumption of validity with the status quo and defending the status quo, so anyone who wants to change the status quo has the burden of presentation and the burden of persuasion.
Core is the status quo and challengers to the status quo have neither met their burden of presentation nor their burden of persuasion in order to successfully change the status quo. That lack of success does not mean that they will not be successful in the future to make various changes to bitcoin.... If you want to call that democratic, then sure, it could be some form of democracy to attempt to persuade and to present evidence sufficient to persuade a change.. or even to bring computing power or some other leveraged asset (such as public opinion or bitcoin user opinion), and some assets carry more bargaining power than others. At this point, the most bargaining power seems to be with the miners and the software developers, and there seem to be various factors influencing them.... that causes the directed changes, including seg wit and whatever is going to come thereafter.