I think we shouldn't get sucked into the distracting technical debate about OP_RETURN -- there is a principle that's at stake: Do not make meaningful changes that nearly all users are against, for debatable marginal benefit, EVEN IF it's "better" technically. That's not your place, nor your role, open source developer. Satoshi gave Bitcoin to humanity so we all own it. You are putting your speech on OUR PROPERTY; you are a steward, not the boss. As people migrate away to other versions, it becomes clearer to see that the consensus rules are no longer in the Bitcoin Core code as they once were (reference implementation). They are now in all our nodes, all agreeing with each other's DNA expression, with the resulting phenotype being the timechain. To come to understand this, consider if Bitcoin Core changed the consensus rules unilaterally - that can't change what all the users run, where the true rules are. And so, the more diversification away from Core, the less of a central point of failure/attack it becomes, and the better for Bitcoin. Everyone should celebrate the reduction of Bitcoin Core as the first choice of Node flavour. Core groupies are spending all day on Twitter fighting... but why? Why do they care? Why are they seemingly so coordinated? It would be a far more natural a response to not care and let people run what that want to run. Something is fishy about the behaviour. "Oh, it's not your property, you can just fork, or make your own version from scratch"... EXACTLY. You can only pick one... 1) Bitcoin is not all our property, we can all fork or use Knots (OK, then why are you fighting on Twitter with Knots users? Why are their nodes being ddos attacked? What's the incentive?) 2) Bitcoin is all our property and you fucked up.