Although I am deeply in the 'light footprint' camp, I find it equally valid that people who signed on to Bitcoin thinking that it could scale to become the world's economic system could be feeling slighted.

I honestly can say that I recognized the conflict within seconds of having a basic understanding of Bitcoin, but then I have a background in operating datacenters and dealing with fairly large amounts of data.  Even if Merkle pruning had progressed it really would not fully solve some of the more difficult scaling issues.

Neither the 'peer-2-peer' concept nor the 'replace the banks' concept were ever deprecated and I consider the Bitcoin project fairly disingenuous in this failing.  To blame individuals for their own particular differences in opinion is not really completely appropriate in my mind.