There's also the question of how many people audit the 1370 commits that make Knots different. It's basically a giant patch set on top of Bitcoin Core, similar to what Liquid does. Despite my issues with Luke, I do trust him to not steal peoples coins.

But that's not an ideal trust model. Part of the problem is a lack of upstreaming. And that's not always because of a fundamental disagreement on functionality. Sometimes the patches just don't meet the review bar for Bitcoin Core. That itself isn't the end of the world either, but it does make comparative review harder.

But I hear OpenSats is going to fix that with grants? :-)