I'm firmly convinced that without the "maxis" (as you call them) Bitcoin would never be here, SN would not exist. It takes fkng commitment to work on something, push hard, overcome technical issues when the World believes that you're doing something stupid. For years Bitcoin has been something stupid for the general public, only the "maxis" virtue signaling kept stuff together. Other than that, I don't think "maxis" are the issue...the issue is the shitcoining idea to earn more fiat shitcoins with the appreciation of bitcoin price.
PS. Nobody cheered the Ver arrest. If you know someone that did that, you've an issue in your friends circles.
PSS. SoV is strictly related to MoE: if something is SoV than people would be willing to earn it. To earn it someone should give it to you. The only thing I would focus on with this regards is the idea of noKYC-MoE, which is possibly the real issue now. Governments could possibly decide to let us bitcoin, but with full KYC and other orwellian measures...this is the issue. To tackle this we should focus more on adoption at the merchant level, which means that sometimes we should go out and pay with sats, to make the sats flow in the real economy. But SoV is still a key point and does not falsify this concept.
PSSS. Do you have some suggestions mate? What would you do differently? We're all ears.