"A recap of the OP_RETURN "debate"

Core: Filters don't work. Bitcoiners: They obviously do, otherwise you wouldn't need to remove them.

Core: We don't have the technical means t maintain them, so we're removing the limit. Bitcoiners: We gave you the technical means in a PR two years ago, Core rejected it, it was implemented in Knots and it works.

Core: We can't stop all spam reliably, so why bother? Bitcoiners: Because life is not black or white, and fastening your seatbelt when driving a car is safer even though some people die in car crashes.

Core: Here's 7 transactions that even your precious filters didn't catch. Bitcoiners: Here's 2 million transactions that were caught.

Core: You can't censor valid transactions just because you don't like them. They paid a fee! Bitcoiners: There's millions of Nigerian princes contacting people through email every day. These are "valid transactions" too, yet you send those to spam. This is obviously not censorship, so that argument is deceitful and intellectually dishonest.

Core: What is spam objectively anyway? Bitcoiners: The receiver - not the sender - gets to decide what's useful to them. You're removing the ability of nodes to decide that, implying you know best.

Core: These transactions will end up in blocks anyway, and we can't incentivize profit-seeking miners to go out-of-band. Bitcoiners: It's not your job to incentivize or deter miners. Your job is to work on the Bitcoin client while prioritizing the one thing that makes Bitcoin unique and truly decentralized: nodes.

Core: But we want better fee estimation and block propagation. Bitcoiners: So do we, but never at the expense of decentralization and self-sovereignty. And btw, there is no such thing as "the mempool. Nodes run the show.

Core: This is a technical discussion. Stop philosophying and using analogies, you plebs! Bitcoiners: We gave you a technical solution that works, the philosophic rationale and the logical arguments. Stop turning Bitcoin into a shitcoin.

If you're seeing bias here, it's because you're too stubborn to admit that one side is clearly more informed, rational and morally calibrated than the other.

This is why there's distrust in Core. It's got nothing to do with technical competency and rational discourse. It's just pure and simple political shenanigans, whataboutisms, strawman arguments and in some cases sheer lies."

I think that it's because it's a matter of personal policy rather than consensus. Each node has a right to set their own policy, because there is no in unified memepool, each node has it's own memepool. Because bitcoin is a monetary network if policies are set liberally then more content would be written to the Blockchain, and if nodes refuse to relay such content then they need to pay more to miners to get into a block, creating a natural policing mechanism.

I see the policy layer as equivalent to the classical legal concepts of malum prohibitum (cheating on your taxes), and the validity layer as equivalent to malum in se (murder).

Its up to nodes to regulate, to keep things hygienic, and miners to validate.

Or it could be that Satoshi didn't think of everything and get everything he wanted into consensus. There is abundant evidence that he intended for bitcoin to be a monetary network and that regulating against too much content getting added to the Blockchain was not considered censorship by him or early Bitcoin Core contributors.

This is one of the best explainers of what OP_RETURN is and how it came about. It was always limited by filters and the filters are effective even though they are sometimes bypassed. https://blog.bitmex.com/dapps-or-only-bitcoin-transactions-the-2014-debate/