My first impression of Bitcoin Core, during the blocksize wars, was also that of arrogance. It's an unfortunate side-effect of people losing patience when having to re-explain something a hundred times. Time they're not spending on writing code, and energy they're losing to remain motivated to write code.

The project is run by volunteers who do not have time, and should not waste time, for maintaining useless functionality. Having people in the project that are (somewhat) comfortable in delivering such bad news is extremely important. I've been on the receiving end of that too internally.

You do not want Bitcoin Core to be a please-everyone kind of project. That's a recipe for unmaintainable code and really bad bugs down the line.