The taproot soft fork brought inscriptions into existence, unintentionally. Why not patch it up?
Discussion
Because it's a cash cow to some, just like the recent op_return change by a few select core devs is - and as the old saying goes "money corrupts people".
You can do inscriptions without taproot.
or just admit the BCashers were right?
Really? I’ve never heard that. Why was it not done before the taproot merge?
NFTs etc weren't really a thing before taproot IIRC.
And once taproot merged it only makes sense to use taproot.
I think there were images in bitcoin all the way back in 2010 already.
True, but I believe taproot enabled larger images to be stored on the chain and at a cheaper cost, which is why we saw ordinals and the likes take off
Segwit really did that rather than taproot
I think it was a 1/2 punch. SegWit made it cheap; Taproot made it possible for data to be large.
Without the discount from SegWit, the fees for large images would likely be prohibitive. Without Taproot's relaxed limits, the full image wouldn't fit in a single, standard transaction. I could be wrong