I hope that Segwit+2MB gets enough support to finally end this absurd war. At this time it looks as the only non contentious alternative. I don't like the idea of non unanimous hard forks, nor UASF. Whatever is supported by an almost unanimous majority is ok to me at this time (Well, except BU/EC as I am totally against it).
Seemed like a decent compromise to me. Core programmers snubbing it was disappointing.
Agreed, the total lack of ability to make a compromise, even one that doesn't seem to have big drawbacks is disappointing.
So, no comment from anyone at Core at all. Is it totally dead in the water?
If Core is invited into the discussion to merely rubberstamp an agreement, then why should they participate more?
They are not going to agree to a hardfork, so why come up with an agreement that involves a hardfork.. and if there is a hardfork, that means a change in governance.. why would they participate in that? Core members say these kinds of things, but no one seems to want to hear them, and act as if they are not responding and come up with some kind of supposed compromise that include "no go" and unnecessary terms.
A hard fork wouldn't necessarily require a change in governance. It could easily be implemented by the Core team, and I would personally feel more secure if it was.
Their incentives to avoid a hard fork aren't really to do with power, more to do with what their preferred method of scaling is (offchain scaling combined with a fee market on the chain, from what I can gather).
Their preference is security, because we saw the disasterous instability of a hardfork in ethereum when it had less than 1/30 the value of BTC's current marketcap. Don't try to dilute away the governance issue, and hardforks are no little "play thing" If you implement a hardfork and you don't have a vast majority of folks on-board, such as 95% - ish, then the minority group is going to screw up stability, involving value in terms of the market cap and also value in terms of folks already invested in various kinds of development and ongoing projects.
The big blocker nut jobs play around as if these matters are trivial... and that there is some justification to make unnecessary changes for the mere sake of change... that is called changing governance - which is also not easy... we do not want bitcoin to be easy to change, merely because there are a bunch of whiners and hostage takers who are threatening further damages.