didn't hear about knots until now, so I did a quick search and all the tech journaly articles make it sound like a 50/50 split with core not caring about spam and knots being the rouge saviour project (my impression after skimming)

what I really liked about the original bitcoin paper and now the development is how it took incentive engineering serious and thinks about social lines of attack. Interesting to see all the new attack vectors being tested (legal, mass media etc) and bitcoin still standing. quite the feat