EDIT: I will also that ask that you and Luke-Jr discuss the Coiledcoin 51% attack accusations separately from this thread, if that's okay.
No, I believe the Coiledcoin attack should be a part of this discussion. I would never have known about it if it hadn't been brought up, so I investigated what happened. What Luke-jr did to Coiledcoin was similar to a bully on the beach coming along and kicking apart a sand castle some kids were in the middle of building, saying it was in the way of people walking on the beach as justification. He used computing resources which did not belong to him, but were entrusted to his care, to sabotage another project.
I agree with that. There are a lot of similarities between the Coiledcoin attack, and the reduction from 80 bytes to 40.
No member of the core dev, gave any rational arguments to justify this reduction.
There is no other choice than to see this decision as an attack directly against XCP and MSC.
This kind of attack highlights a serious problem that goes far beyond the consequences for XCP and MSC.
The whole community should be involved to protect Bitcoin of such conduct.