What's stopping your company from hiring one developer to do nothing but code cleanups and submitting them to GitHub? There's nothing centralized about that.
Because cleanups would require very deep reaching changes. If we hired a cleanup dev his #1 task would be "find and remove all magic numbers anywhere in the codebase".
You keep saying you want to get rid of magic numbers, how would you limit the size of blocks? Or would you just have unlimited block sizes?
This issue has already been discussed, and
consensus has already been reached.
I agree. Perhaps "forced" had the wong connotation. It was obviously persuasion, not coercion. My point is merely that you and the other respected developers used your influence to persuade the 0.8 miners to abandon the 0.8 fork. I simply suggest that this consumed some of your store of influence for future emergencies.
Let's elaborate on that a little. Bitcoin's #1 pool is trading while insolvent at the present time because it just got hit by the double whammy of:
1. Oh, you made the mistake of updating to our most recent version? Well here you go, redownload the chain, pay submitted work as if difficulty were negative for a while. That's what hot wallets and autopayments are for right?
2. Oh, you made the mistake of updating to our most recent version? Well...revert. Oh, you need an old chain because the new chain you just paid half your house for is no good? Awww. Here, lose 16 blocks on top of the 1.1k BTC you lost before. We really want you to lose the whole house, not just half of it.
The entire "miners vote" is a sham and a total red weasel currently. Miners don't vote, miners just sheepishly follow around because "devs say so". And incidentally, a willingness to do the soviet thing and pretend this sort of crap is covered by "popular vote" when no actual voting took place speaks volumes as to the moral integrity of the pretenders. Ugly stuff.
If the miners had half a clue they'd have told Idiot Co-op exactly where to stuff it, and here's the beauty of it: with the arrival of ASICs and their significant capital cost, the odds that the sort of feelgood ninnies currently involved in mining will still be around are nil.
This is what money does, it shakes out the deadwood and culls the herd. Next time you do something because "Mike" said you should may very well be the last time you get to do anything. That little tidbit isn't too likely to pass unnoticed seeing how universal the conservation instinct is.
In other words: next time this happens devteam is gone, for the simple reason that miners will not revert, or even talk to those "devs" again.