You’re right. Maybe I’m a bit of a fork fundamentalist. I prefer people run new software on their own, and let others join later if they find it valuable. If you really don’t need others to update to accommodate your change, you should just make it.

I still feel like I’m missing a piece of how this functions in practice though. It feels strange that someone like Adam Back would implement confidential transactions on a L2 like liquid instead of as a soft fork if it really was better suited for the base layer.

I’m open to arguments which explain it logically - you just lost me a bit at the “you’re trusting anyway” argument. I personally think it’s better to assume someone is intelligent and capable of verifying code for themselves than just assume it’s futile and that they should trust the word of others.