yup. it just lets you control this stuff, and sets reasonable defaults. i don't think that these are advertised in node info messages (support flags) but maybe those will be expanded.

within reason and limited by how desirable the features are, knots is going to leapfrog core eventually because they didn't flip to mainstream development know-it-all policies about features.

people have no way to participate in shaping the behaviour of the p2p network of bitcoin when these options are removed. it has never, before recently, been something that bitcoin core ever did - removing user policy settings for the mempool. i am quite familiar with many of the features and during the time i was working with btcd i saw new things added, both in btcd and core. what core devs have done is regressive. they are going to be punished by users.

and of course, being able to allow stuff like coinjoin and payjoin payments to be relayed will be done, if currently the default is not that, probably it will be changed to a more reasonable approach. and probably Luke is not going to be the only dev maintaining it in the future.

core devs are a nest of vipers at this point. the spooks trying to build for a takeover of bitcoin have badly misunderestimated the determination of the cyberhornets.