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.
Sometimes I think about the economics regards how a network will scale.
Is it possible to do an analogy between bitcoin network and TCP/IP stack development ? My point of analogy is that both networks have a finite supply (bitcoin 21 million and IPV4 2
32.
For instance, when IPV4 was developed it faced the problem of address exhaustion (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion ) the solution was network address translation (NAT)and Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR)...
Sometimes I think that we are reaching a point of bitcoin supply curve that you can be either reward by LN channels or old fashion mining to keep the network running ...
ps-> I am not totally sure what I am talking about ... I pretty much appreciate any comments ...