That I will not deny, but tell me which other group of developers are as good as Core?
Given we only talk about the pure protocol level and that I can only answer for myself here -
my conclusion was that a perfect protocol is as tiny as possible and does not contain any magical numbers and does not need other layers on top
Ok but you know I would disagree and ask what "magical numbers" are you talking about? Are you insinuating that the Core developers are using "magic computer science" to maintain Bitcoin?
for its most attractive and basic function (exchange money for nearly free or fees < 1cent ) it cannot be the core that came after Gavin.
There will always come an external cost on any system. Internalize on that very deeply.
So I fell back to check, what Satoshi really did / plan and I decided that BCH is the better implementation- and btw one big feature from Satoshi was, that real ppl do not matter at all - Satoshi's Bitcoin is anti-fragile to that, so no need at all to check / qualify any individuals.
Then we should follow Satoshi like a high priest of a religion? Is that how the community should decide what is and what is not Bitcoin?
Plus you did not answer which group of developers are as good as the Core developers.
Magic numbers are hard coded numbers with no proper reason - like the 1 MB hard cap - this should be rather time adjusted param like you have in the halving process.
And no, I m not religious, but it's always good if you back loop your thinking to sources where the success happened and why. Esp in times when things become messy and you need to distill the root protocol in order to scale that in best practice industrial manners.
And yes, no individual can decide what the best globally used Bitcoin implementation of the Satoshi protocol is, but mass adoption needs simple cheap secure on-chain TX. They will decide that for us - that is called just Bitcoin then.