It’s good that you’re not upgrading yet. Take the time to think through the impact of opening the doors for a new wave of non-financial spam from VC-backed startups that want to use an “officially approved” way to store their data in the blockchain (because a one-time mining fee for permanent storage forever on full-nodes is cheaper than funding their own layer 2 network). The existing hacks spammers use get a 75% Segwit discount compared to using OP_RETURN, so those spammers aren’t going to do extra work so they can pay more. We need to filter what they’re already doing - that’s the battle Knots has taken on and Core has refused to attempt because they are philosophically aligned with miners - “any consensus valid transaction a miner could mine should be relayed and stored by all nodes”.

Long-term, we need a third option that takes the latest Core version and patches in reasonable default filters (that node operators can turn on/off themselves), with no personality-related drama like we currently see between Core and Knots.

Short-term we need to run Knots (which at the moment is essentially Core plus tighter spam filters) to signal to the network that we want Core developers to fight spam instead of worrying about how to enable their buddies at VC-backed startups to spam the network in “approved” ways.