They ridicule the BTC camp for it's Raspberry Pi nodes and have embraced the idea that nodes (which for them are de facto miners) will be big server farms pushing the boundaries of storage space, network bandwidth and computational resources.
Well, yes. I get that many think that huge numbers of non-mining fully-validating clients bring security to the system. I just find such notions delusional.
In the end, the entities with the power are the entities with the most to lose - the miners. The thing that keeps the miners from acting nefarious is the threat of users -- measured by economic power, not by a numerical count of trivially sybillable validators -- abandoning their generated chain en masse. Which is the brilliant design left us by satoshi.
And even if non-mining validators _actually_ held any power: Why would we want to artificially constrain the potentially world-changing power of this network to a lowest common denominator of irresponsible neckbeard hobbyists unable to make the proper life choices to enable them to leave mommy's basement? The notion is pure folly.
There is no doubt that validating nodes hold power. UASF proved that.
The original paradigm was the miners both did the hash work and the consensus validation. When the idea was 1 CPU 1 vote this meant both hasrate and consensus validation was distributed. Upon the advent of ASICS harshpower began to centralize among the producers of the hardware as well as the large ASIC farms that became the current day miners. But protocol consensus was still something users did not need specialized hardware to validate/support. So that function branched off to be a list of users LAGER than those providing hashrate security.
This is a VERY GOOD thing in my opinion.
If both hashrate AND consensus validation coalesced to smaller and smaller group the network would be less robustly distributed. But with the way the power is currently distributed we have a sort of distribution of powers.
If the network evolves too quickly and requires expensive, specialized hardware for BOTH Hashrate AND consensus and chain validation then we are introducing TRUST where we do not necessarily have to.
I, and many others, feel very passionately that the distributed nature of the power in bitcoin is worth defending. Taking a sort of ad hominem stance by calling people who validate the protocol and transactions on the bitcoin network "irresponsible neckbeard hobbyists unable to make the proper life choices to enable them to leave mommy's basement" is not helpful or realistic IMHO.