I hate this victim mentality like core contributors are paupers. Why work on it?

If they're smart, the average Core dev has tens of millions in bitcoin at this point. They should protect their biggest asset. And regardless of how you feel about this particular filters issue, they made numerous unforced errors with the way they rolled out and communicated the change.

I hate to say it but this is why corporations use project managers and product people. Insulate engineers from public facing comments. Putting your foot your mouth can wreck a project - even FOSS.