Long term holder and lurker here. Been in BTC since 2011 and I have been following the scaling debate closely for the past year.
I also realized that some of the Core devs weren't as trustworthy as I thought they were, and that some of them became so entrenched in their position that they failed to see the bigger picture and refused to even consider a compromise.
At this point I think it's best to look at what the code does, rather than who wrote it. Code that makes bitcoin work better should be adopted, compiled, and run, and code that doesn't should be ignored. Simple.
I disagree. Who runs the code is completely relevant if that group has a lot of power.
The difference is that Core's power is to propose code, while BITMAIN's power is to signal for it.
If BITMAIN, a private mining company, decides to go off and propose their own code, it means that they have control over their new chain unless enough other miners signal for their code to negate their power. For now, this is basically manipulation of the new chain since they have the power for 51% attacks, potentially for a
long time considering that the market won't support their chain for a while, and the power to create changes in the code without consulting miners which are supposed to be independent from developers.