"after Core is out of the picture" image You are talking about consensus with Core out of the picture? As far as I can see, most serious Bitcoin devs are organized in Core now. You're talking like Knots was the new reference client already.

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seriously corrupted organisation at this point. out of the picture means no longer having so much clout. and i personally have wanted to build a #golang based option that has the nice wallet GUI and fast IBD. btcd is pathetic. i'm too busy with nostr dev at this point but i'm intimately familiar with the btcd codebase. the best outcome is that bitcoin has like 5 major clients making up 80% of the userbase, and making these kinds of arbitrary changes is a lot harder to do than it was when 80+% of nodes are running one implementation. that's why they have arranged to get spam-friendly devs into position on their team. and lunatics like peter todd. that guy alone screams red flag that someone completely non-representative of bitcoin culture has been inserted.
I think both groups have valid points. It's true: miners can 'slipstream' spam in to the chain regardless of relay policy. Also true: relay policy filters and widespread use by relay operators discourage this behavior at scale. I don't see bad actors, I see different visions. That is decentralization. Both sides will keep working on their vision, as they should, and the market will decide.