VS, is there some big _Classic post or something that states all the stuff you've been posting? I ask because I feel that many of your points are arguments that I've seen gmaxwell respond to before when brought up by other people. He argues this stuff far better than I could ever hope to (being an actual developer and all), so I'd rather refer you to
his posting history than bother trying to repeat stuff.
You might want check this out, a debate between me and gmaxwell:
https://bitco.in/forum/threads/discussion-with-greg-maxwell.841/I find it deeply troubling that you seem to consider an environment of multiple implementations that constantly threaten to fork the Bitcoin network over their pet issues to be the healthiest system. Altcoins are a fantastic mechanism for testing new ideas and proposing different models, without the threat of forcing, "upgrades", across the entire ecosystem, inadvertently stealing people's coins, and possibly breaking everything if a hard fork is made to a faulty client--which is what clients like Classic threaten to do. gmaxwell doesn't seem to express an interest in working in that sort of environment--for reasons that should be pretty obvious--and I'd imagine that a great number of other developers would share similar positions on the matter.
The amount of discussion had over opt-in RBF was rather surprising; making out a node policy change like that to be as contentious as changes to consensus rules was mind-boggling.