What I am not understanding about drive chains is why its all or nothing. Couldn't you just as well have normal merge mining today? It would be less efficient, it would require miners to have a separate node, but it would provide some validation to its use case, and the upgrade to blind merge mining seems clearer.
Discussion
It’s not all or nothing. I think its just as times goes on hard it much harder to make changes to bitcoin core.
I think if the core people working on drive chains did as much marketing as Zeus then your fight would be over by now, win or lose. I read the bitcoin mailing list archives for august today, and honestly its got me scared, I really don't want bitcoin to be easier to change. I don't think I'm against drive chains, although I'm not sure if I'd be quick to support them either; it doesn't seem as important as things like cross input signature aggregation or graftroot, and I'd like to see those play out in a more fundamentally bitcoin centric bitcoin before we turn it into a bit of an octupus with drive chains. I don't know.