One thousand sats to each of the best answers where best means treating the question asker with respect and providing a nuanced and factual layout of the relevant game theory. Many of us have answered this question for ourselves, but if someone could have answered this question for you, what answer would you have wished to hear?
A friend DM'd me:
Are the bitcoin network maintainers (Wladimir van der Laan + Pieter Wuille, Marco Falke, Michael Ford, Jonas Schnelli and Samuel Dobson) a common topic in bitcoin convos? Specifically is that group's influence viewed as a network risk since they kind of represent a centralized power to the network?
I have my own response to these questions, but I thought we all would collectively provide a more exhaustive answer and build a repository of answers for future-coiners.
1,000 sats paid 7 times
software 1
is the only software used in the network (or used by the very large majority of the nodes) and whatever decision its developers make ends up being run by the nodes, then the answer is Yes.