Definitely,

Without Segwit there would be no Lightning...

Shoot I meant SegWit. A hard fork was the alternative tho right? I don’t fully understand what the ramifications would have been for Bitcoin had the big blockers simply been told to fuck off.

If you read The Block Size Wars you will realize that it was not as simple as telling one contingent to fuck off. There were good arguments and also some skullduggery on both sides for each position. Thankfully Segwit was implemented and the large blockers went their own way.

I did 😂, and I will re-read. I remember it certainly wasn’t that simple to tell the other to buzz off at the time, but what I’m driving at is, knowing what we know now, if there was a scenario by which big blockers could have went their own way and Bitcoin could have remained unchanged and fully functional.

I'm not sure why you used the 😂 emoji but your comments show that you don't really understand what happened. The Big Blockers did go their own way which is why we have ETH and a plethora of shitcoins. Bitcoin did remain unchanged and fully function but as I said, the adoption of Segwit which was brought about by the pressure from the Big Blockers was useful to the network and allowed Lightning development.

Fully admit I have a lot to learn, and I’m laughing at myself for being still being dense on the details having read the book you recommended. Let me ask one more question, if not for the pressure from the big blockers, would SegWit, or something like it, have been adopted to best position Bitcoin to achieve its goal?

Sorry, I've been gone. No doubt something on the second layer would have been developed but segwit was there and thats what they used. IMHO bitcoin never needed anything to "achieve its goal" as you say as Satoshi never cared about price action and his only concern was freeing plebs from Central Banking via peer-to-peer transactions with no middleman.

No worries! That makes sense. And that’s exactly what I meant by the goal, freeing the plebs at scale