Actually, yep... various folks also wear combination of hats, and may be acting in one capacity in time 1 and another capacity in time 2, and some of these folks may be benevolent and/or honest and other are tricky... but in the end, bitcoin is supposed to be relatively trustless system, though we cannot completely get away from trust - especially because there are also various centralized systems that are built on top of bitcoin that may require some trust, even though bitcoin itself does not require trust (at least that's the theory)..
I also think that sometimes, this mechanism to attempt to get protocol changes that makes it very difficult for devs to agree on the causes advantages bitcoin by not allowing changes unless is an overwhelming large number of folks in agreement... so we kind of get stuck with the original design of bitcoin and modest changes to bitcoin and truly vetted changes.. Which is all fine and dandy, so long as the original design is not broken.
Regarding what happened today? Do you mean what happened to day in respect to the hacking of the DAO, or something else?
I agree with the second paragraph (along with what you said as well for sure), since consensus is a must, this makes me ultra comfortable that we will most of the time if not always have the right decision.
I meant with what happened in the Wall Observer thread, the fight between core and classic, as always :\
1) part of the strength of bitcoin remains it's actual invention that starts from a super strong foundation that solves the double spend problem.. and there is a large enough community of persons, both in the development and in the mining community that recognize and respect that any changes to bitcoin cannot compromise foundational bitcoin principles - or otherwise convert bitcoin into something that it is not.... and the survival of the attempt at a hardfork likely taught a lot more people the lesson of identifying threats such as XT/classic and the like.
2) I suppose that there is nothing unusual about having disparate and combative views in the space, and we cannot necessarily expect any such kind of harmony (except maybe in a thread like this in which you may likely remove the shills). In any event, when forums are not very much censored (such as the WO thread), there are going to be a lot of strong views, and only the real obvious shills and trolls are removed, the others are going to be able to express their anti-bitcoin opinions and to muddy the waters especially if they at least attempt to provide some evidence and/or logic for their views (even while sometimes spreading misinformation, at the same time).