My understanding is that getting rid of LOT is the same thing as LOT=false. So if he regrets adding LOT, then why is he pushing so hard for LOT=true?
No, not quite
It's making LOT changeable that luke is regretting. He thinks it should be set in the code, and not changeable unless you edit the code (which is not easy for everybody)
So can the devs just vote to get rid of LOT and move forward? Is it too late for that? Seems like that would solve the debate no?
someone (Matt Corallo, a Bitcoin dev) suggested that. But his proposal was just to activate the fork the simplest way: Bitcoin 0.21.1 would just start enforcing the fork after August 1st 2022. No signals, no percentages. Either you're running the new code or you're not.
That's not such a terrible compromise, all discussion will be pretty simple afterwords, chain forking risks are minimized, at the expense of a long wait for using Taproot.