Benefits for Bitcoin users
Counterparty provides us (Bitcoins users) the ability issue shares, pay dividends and trade on a distributed exchange using BTC (without the need for XCP). This is a valuable functionality for all Bitcoin users and increases Bitcoin's value proposition. It is not in the best interest of Bitcoin users to shutdown this valuable functionality. Especially when there are competitors like - - Ethereum, Nxt, Protoshares, eMunie whom will have asset trading platforms built into their blockchain.
Unfortunately, it sounds like the Counterparty team is not interested in being a teamplayer and working with Bitcoin development, and giving Bitcoin no choice but to activate self-defences.
Please distinguish between Counterparty "team" members (there are only two developers) and the supporters, fans, and investors (the rest of us) who are certainly feeling frustrated and confused, and can't always make sense of what seem like arbitrary rules.
PhantomPhreak is one of the two listed, and has expressed that he is only willing to do things under certain Bitcoin-hostile terms.
We're not going to regress from relaying our transactions through the main Bitcoin network to relaying them, through central points of failure, directly to some subset of mining pools that have specifically whitelisted us with a patch. We won't depend on any feature not supported by vanilla Bitcoin Core, even if it means storing the message data in unprunable, (or even unspendable!) outputs for the time being.
You're asking them to do something that isn't trasmitted on the normal bitcoin infrastructure. To this point the blockchain has been agnostic, so this is abnormal. How is that statement bitcoin-hostile?