Agreed. But you're also not completely off the hook. There are also economic implications from offchain and voting-pools version of offchain. People also have a right to ask about that similarly. There are actually economic implications. If OpenTransactions sucks a bunch of transactions off-chain that deprives bitcoin of transaction fees, and so it lowers bitcoin security. I am not saying this is a bad tradeoff, just point out that nothing is free of implications.
I dunno, it seems part of the bitcoin social contract is to be deliberately (and ideally enforceably) agnostic about what people do with their bitcoins. It that means sending them to some crazy off-chain system with voting pools or whatever other silly idea, so be it. How is that anyone's business any more than spending them on wikileaks donations?
If bitcoin can't handle people doing crazy things off chain like voting pools or MtGox, then it has some pretty big problems. It seems fairly proven that it can survive MtGox at least.
This includes the so-called federated model of sidechains.
I still see a gargantuan difference between that and changing the protocol.