PhantomPhreak is saying that he will NOT do something that depends on enlisting a small subset of mining pools, precisely because he wants to be a team player and build only on "vanilla Bitcoin Core."
This is nonsense. Nobody on the Bitcoin Core dev team wants Counterparty to abuse multisig.
"Enlisting ... mining pools" is the only alternative to
forcing mining pools against their will by hiding it in multisig (although hopefully soon we'll have a filter to deal with that).
Eligius is over 10% of the network, so it's hardly a "small subset" anyway.
Besides, if you're so confident that the other pools won't freely service Counterparty, maybe you should really re-think whether forcing it on them is acceptable??