I had to listen to the WBD episode with Mechanic twice to make sure I got this right. One of the arguments Core is making is that nodes should have more complete mempools for better fee estimation. Mechanic said that Core doesn't even use the local mempool to estimate fees. I have no way to verify this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but if that's true that is a blatant contradiction. Why would this be an argument if it doesn't even apply to their own software? That's insane.

I'm not sure if it's exactly a smoking gun, but it's a pretty huge red flag to me. I've been defending them because the idea that the OG implementation is being corrupted is almost unthinkable and I wanted to believe Bitcoin is rock solid, but even so I've still mostly advocated to not force the removal of filters on the nodes. Now I don't know what to think. I might actually have to run Knots.