Perhaps if Core realized they were, whether they liked it or not, a political entity, and had accordingly crafted a public comms strategy, this whole debacle could have been mitigated. Instead they let literal trolls and influencers shape the debate. As such, they've squandered a metric fuckton of political capital on a standardness change and almost guaranteed any actual substantial changes in the future will be an even bigger clusterfuck. The people who want to change Bitcoin most ironically just did a huge service to ossification.