Fucking no it's not. It's like a dude asking valid questions and you "the expert" saying: We know what's best. Falsehoods.

you're right, we should listen to podcasters instead of people who have been working on the code for decades. are you serious?

Who said podcasters? I said people asking direct technical questions and all I get is "well the alternative is worse" I've personally talked with Murch and that's all he gave me just this wishy-washy "we are doing the least bad thing." I brought up removing the witness discount, I brought up OP_RETURN being a testing code being repurposed, I brought up how pre 2015 nodes have no signature validation for taproot or segwit transactions. Still, NO FUCKING ANSWERS. I'm no novice, I just don't contribute code because I am not confident that my C programming can hold up the whole financial system. But, obviously THEY do so they should probably be able to answer some basic questions. I know you know you are making a strawman argument so, I guess I will wait for you to rephrase your rebuttal.

the original thread was in the context of podcasters creating pleb slop to attack core maintainers, that was the discussion at the time

I read the thread, I consider myself a Plebian because I am not part of the Patricians. There are many people who quietly read the code and voice their opinions while not writing pull requests for several reasons. Mine is I have an insecurity about my code. Others fear deanonymization. Others are technical but not coders. I think Core respond to incentives but are not necessarily malicious. That's why I help audit Thebitcoincommons.org and Libbitcoin.info The more implementations that modularize and make consensus validatable the better.