Over and over, the concrete evidence shows that the hardfork at all cost push comes largely from shills, conmen, and their victims.
It looks like Classic/XT may be defeated. However, lets try to be as gracious and respectful as we can in our victory. At least some of the Classic/XT advocates did genuinely have Bitcoins best interests at heart, we just disagreed with their methods, we need to still respect them. Gaining this victory was vital, it demonstrated the rules of the system are resilient, but at the same time weaknesses were exposed in the process.
We need to recognize that the system is not perfect, it is not totally robust and there was (and still is) a genuine risk of a Classic victory. Therefore it is potentially possible to eliminate an existing protocol rule without strong consensus, in some circumstances. However, hopefully this whole saga has demonstrated that the rules are resilient enough for many practical circumstances. Recognizing this imperfection, I think we should, from a position of strength, be pragmatic, and as a sign of respect for those people who have hopefully been defeated, implement a change in the limit to 2MB, consistent with the HK agreement.
It's just that a couple of well meaning dipshits went to China a few months back to learn and educate about the issues and managed to let themselves get locked in a room until 3-4 am until they would personally agree to propose some hardfork after segwit. They're now struggling to accomplish the seemingly impossible task of upholding their agreement (even though it was made under duress and even though f2pool immediately violated it) while obeying their personal convictions and without losing the respect of the technical community.
It is unfortunate that to some it appears as if the miners forced this agreement by duress. I was at the meeting and your criticism is fair in many respects. However, we must accept the reality that Bitcoin is not a perfect system and the agreement did occur, had this not happened then Classic may well have activated by now. I think we need to be pragmatic and to some extent accept the unfortunate reality that the actions of the "dipshits" were necessary.