They are either dishonest or dont understand what they are talking about:
Therefore if the bitcoin protocol gets changed only by a small amount, some people will abuse that opportunity, and gradually add more changes, until bitcoin goes off it's original mission, and becomes centralized.
same can be said for softforks
I just dont understand why people want to do a hardfork, when the risks associated with it are just too big.
its only dangerous if one group of devs says no to cause contention by making it no longer a unanimous change by everyone... not due to any rational reason of what the users want. but purely about keeping a "political" grip of control of what direction only they want to take bitcoin.
in short.. if core released a 2mb or BU codebase.. then they could just let the users decide to take it up or not.. because all other implementations will work together
but by not releasing it they are limiting options and causing the controversy that actually makes a hard fork dangerous. and instead wanting to add code that takes bitcoin in a different direction and blackmail and bribe people into accepting core as the dominant central repo..
hard forks are only controversial because core is making it so