Part of what got decided was to use BIP 8 instead BIP 9 -- I tried to understand what the advantage was and I guess its because they don't want a repeat of the activation controversy brought on by segwit? I'd be grateful if somebody could explain the difference between the two as I think I'm missing the significance. Thanks in advance.
BIP8 is for activating changes by block height, so that the new rules apply only after a specific block has been mined. It is better than using BIP9 which also activates some delay after a specific block number but the version bit for it
expires and can be reused some time, usually a year, after its activation where they assume everyone has moved to that fork.
The problem related to segwit's activation were that there were a bunch of miners/nodes who did not follow through this activation so this bit might have expired and be used for something else without everyone fully following it. There were special BIPs made for segwit activation just to address this problem (BIP91).