Sweet Jesus the replies are long on this one. I see this is a passionate topic, I'll keep it short and sweet.
It's obviously political at this point. Members are all heavily invested in btc, and decisions made about the protocol tend to preserve the wealth /interest of the board, not the populace. It's money, folks, and cronyism/greed is slowing down the innovation worse than regulation.
My idea is that we simply see immutability at work. The fact that the thing is decentralized for the moment, that Core lost its central authority, and that there's no way any more to change anything to the existing immutable protocol - until bitcoin will centralize again, maybe through a consortium of miners having majority hash rate, and there will be again a central boss of bitcoin.
What seems to be "idiotic wars", is in my opinion nothing else but the mutual antagonism that doesn't allow consensus to arise over "cheating on the rules" - something that could be called an attack, but which is also applicable to any other change to the rules: the antagonism that divides miners not to collude over "changing history on the block chain" (in other words, the "51% attack") is the same antagonism that doesn't allow them to change protocol, without an orchestrated simultaneous move, hence "protecting" the rules of the system.