There is no corporate monopoly over bitcoin, and competition is good, I am not sure where you get that from, I have never said such contradictory things.
If you're in favour of competition and a free and open market, then how do you square that with the rampant protectionism going on in the community right now? Protectionism can be defined as actions or policies that restrict or restrain external competition. Core is seen as the "native" code, which some people feel has to be protected or shielded from any outside, external developers, working on their own implementations. If competition is good, you should welcome more alternative clients.
Also, if were are going to head down the route of corporate entities paying developers, many would feel more comfortable if there were a greater number of corporate entities involved. As things stand right now, how many companies are directly paying developers? I'm only aware of five main contributors: Blockstream, MIT, Chaincode Labs, Ciphrex, and BTCC. And two of those, Chaincode Labs and Ciphrex, are companies run *by* developers themselves, so I'm not even sure that counts. They're basically self-funded coders. So it's certainly not a monopoly, but it's not exactly diverse either.
Yes, competition is good, but we have to be careful.
Bitcoin is not a lab experiment with rats, it has 10 billion market cap and a whole new economy depending on it. We cannot affort to skrew it up.
So yes Core deserves some protectionism, by the big bitcoin whales themselves, so its totally legitimate.
If 90% of bitcoin owners favor Core, then that is totally legitimate, because the big money is what counts here. Bitcoin is private property, and if the majority of the money decides 1 path, that is our wish.
I tend to look at Bitcoin as a corporation , because it is essentially that, an unincorporated global corporation, where multiple wealth owners decide our common route that is best for our wealth.
So bitcoin is not a sunday chess club where you can have any form of governance you wish. We are talking about 10 billion dollars here that are jointly owned by all bitcoin owners, and the final word should always be with the majority of the money.
Nodes dont matter, miners dont matter, it's what the 50% +1 percent of the market cap wants matters!
Since Bitcoin is all about personal responsibility, I'm of the opinion (which I'm sure you and many others here won't agree with) that you should carefully consider your investments before plowing money into them. I came into Bitcoin with the full understanding that it was an open source system and that anyone is free to modify the code as they see fit. So I find it hard to sympathise with those who believe that the people running the code don't matter. It's self evident that they do.
No it's a totally legitimate political separation.
Right= Hierarchy, private property, capitalism , 2+2 = 4 , well defined boundaries between objects
Left = Equality , common ownership, communism, 2+2 = 2 , everything is mixed together
You choose which one is better? For bitcoin, and for the future of bitcoin?
It seems to be a popular misconception on this forum that "left" automatically equates to "communism". There are many philosophies including left-libertarianism, syndicalism, statism, anarchism and socialism that all differ to communism in different ways. It would be like me assuming that everyone on the right is automatically a fascist, which would clearly be incorrect. I'd echo the viewpoint that the Authoritarian/Libertarian scale is far more pertinent than the Left/Right one in this discussion. You can still be on the left and have libertarian views, the two aren't mutually exclusive. To further muddy the waters, there are different types of communism. The extreme authoritarian kind of communism is where the state compels the observance of equality by force. Then there's the extreme libertarian kind, which can be colloquially described as "hippies". And, like most things, there are more moderate shades of grey in between (although it should be noted, despite demonstrating this understanding, I don't identify as a communist

).
Further, just because someone might have a philosophy that applies to the broken world of debt-based currencies and corrupt governments, it doesn't necessarily mean they want to apply those same beliefs to this shiny new paradigm we inhabit where code is law and consensus is king. You might view me as a crazy leftist in the real world , but I certainly don't want to "Install a Pension System into the bitcoin protocol" or enact "Automatic wealth redistribution", because I don't think that's what this is for.
Don't fear the leftists, fear the authoritarians. But know also that protectionism is, without exception, an authoritarian concept. There should be no central entity enforcing barriers to what should be a free and open market. No one should be trying to tell anyone else what code they can and can't run. It's a matter of personal freedom.