Politics and the need to have the Core developers out. Some say it was because it would render Bitmain's Asic boost useless, and all other reasons that distracted us away from the truth. But I believe it was politics.
I will leave Achow and the rest more learned about the situation to comment.
Isn't that about a change of block size? Could you go into a bit more of details, how exactly would it render ASIC boost useless?