Yeah, now that inscriptions/ordinals are here, it is certainly up to the free market to decide what data will be inscribed and what fees are paid for the block space…

but the question I’m asking is whether it was a good idea for the rules to allow arbitrary data to take up all of the space in a block in the first place.

Definitely not saying I have the answer, or that my view is the right one. I still have a lot of homework to do on the subject too. It just seems like tacking a big fat secondary market for arbitrary data onto the back of the bitcoin blockchain has the potential to do a lot more harm than good..