I believe the Counterparty devs are saying they expect their transactions to be treated the same as any other on the bitcoin network, because they're paying fees and working within the protocol as presented to them. That seems like a reasonable expectation, why should their transactions be singled out for some kind of special routing arrangement?
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?
Bitcoin doesn't have Counterparty support. I'm asking them to use a temporary side-channel
in addition to normal relaying-to-random-nodes until the Bitcoin network has upgraded to support Counterparty.
While at the same time the upgrade you're talking about is being downgraded from useful to non-useful.
It's disappointing to have such vocal core devs who don't support a content-agnostic blockchain. Fees are there for a reason.