Sure, I can try to explain what I meant.

To start, I would never claim to have very much credibility on topics relating to core development (as the naive title and nature of my post might indicate), but only to speak in generalities. I'm glad to admit I'm curious and trying to learn.

I think that the general sentiment is that his projects are overly-idealistic. Attacks against him accuse him of 'burying his head in the sand,' and that he and his camp would cut off their nose to spite their face--to use your expression. This doesn't really get to the crux of the issues he is raising. I generally like when figures like Dash who present a counter-narrative to conventional wisdom.

Wuille engaged with his points in the thread, which I'm confident you have read by now, at a level I can't really claim to rebut. No doubt, and this goes without saying, he gave intelligent response to Dash's 'whitlist approach'.

My left-of-the-curve take is this. By removing standardness restrictions, core-devs are taking a taoist, be like water, sort of approach; these restrictions are largely ignored since there exist cheaper alternatives for such "nonstandard" or "spam" transactions. But the initial charge against restrictions is that they "encourage" harmful practices (i.e. for non-financial transactions to find alternative rails to the miners directly). Myself, and perhaps Dash would sympathize, I question the semantics of saying this encourages undesirable transaction outputs being included.

If the financial incentive is there for these actors to find rails that bypass the network, is a feature that was intended to curb this behaviour actually "encouraging" it? Does removing them not feel unlike throwing the baby out with the bathwater?