I believe this last part is what most people miss about this debate. I don,t care about default i care about options. So core's plan to depreaciate the option is what rubbed me the wrong way. I believe this is where the rubber meets the road to alternatives. Good to see core contributers starting to realise this.

Pieter Wuille: "Both these concerns are also an assumption by the developers that this is what majority of users will choose to do but that's not a practical conclusion. Specially if the configuration is completely taken away from users. Hypothetically speaking if majority of users choose to change defaults or switch to using more user-friendly node client like Knots then the same argument can be made i.e. the minority not in-sync with majority will have bad fee estimation(if mempool-based) and miners trying to mine more arb-data/spam txs will have higher risk of stale blocks. So, the idea of changing-defaults-radically or deprecating or marking as to-be deprecated is not grounded in solid engineering foundation for a decentralized network where the information and decision-making should be diffused as much as possible instead of basing it on assumptions made by unfounded and theoretical calculations by developers."