I primarily went that direction because I believe allowing individual miners to create their own mining templates while still being able to participate in reward splits is a fantastic way to decentralize mining.

I do generally agree with keeping a default OP_RETURN limit, with the ability for node runners to change or remove it if they like, though. In short, node runners should choose what transactions they want to relay, and miners should choose what transactions they want to include in a block.

Bitcoin is resilient because there are enough people making their own choices about these things that your transaction WILL eventually make it into a block.