The developers have shown that they know and care absolutely nothing about what the real world needs with Bitcoin.   How it is going to be used by real people, and what the industry has been begging for, for 5 years.  

This is exactly why we are in this position in the first place.  People got fed up and split off from the development team that was vocally apathetic about everything except the code.  There was a massive disconnect between "lay people" and the dev team - and since there was no leadership in the dev team to force them to write code that would include end-user needs, it never got done.

TLDR:  The fact that one group has "competent developers" means nothing to me.  At the end of the day your code can be amazing, and no real human beings will ever use it if you aren't creating a product they care about.  And if your "competent developers" care nothing about what end users want, then you've got a product that will never get used.