I hope the gods on mount Bitcoin Foundation are listening once in a while, but Bitcoin's monoculture of a single "magical" C++ implementation whose code serves as the spec cannot go on forever.
I would say you grossly overestimate the importance of some irrelevant foundation thingee. It's a case of Rome, Alabama talking itself into the "center of Christian faith".
[...]It'd seem consensus is emerging that indeed the devs are idiots (should you wish to more politely define that as "strategically myopic" or whatever other phrase). It'd seem the consensus also is emerging that indeed the way forward is,
As far I've read (which includes this whole thread of course), consensus is emerging that the devs are doing a good to very good job overall. You are the only one calling them idiots in this thread, which is wrong, insensitive, and counter-productive. Most of your comments let me think you have no idea what quality management is in software engineering, and what "0 defect" means in this field. You might wonder why Amazon cloud can be unreachable during a whole, why Gmail can lose mails and be unable to restore them from backups, and why NASA shuttles crash.
I would advise you to stop calling people names because they are not delivering that free unicorn to you.
Then you need to learn to read.
And re "heroics": there were no heroics involved here. The in extremis forcing of a downgrade is not heroic. People doing it are not cool.
It is idiocy, and the people doing it were idiots. Yes, they had no choice. Guess why they had no choice, and guess who puts themselves in the situation of having no choice.
Let me make this perfectly clear: the current hard fork is the death of Bitcoin unless the consensus reached here (ie, no more bitcoin client releases until spec, first release code-cleaning release) is implemented exactly.
This is not up for discussion, it is a fact.