The fact that this issue is related to non-consensus code is at the heart of it I think. On one hand Knots makes it more difficult for non-technical people to spam the chain, but on the other hand technical people know that it does not really prevent anything at the end, so this why there is no end to this debate. Ideally spam would be prevented through consensus code, but it is not case, and probably very difficult to fix at this point. I can appreciate the arguments from both sides, but it seems to be a lot of waste energy.