"an AMM gaining material adoption would drive substantial miner centralization. Instead of consensus-computable variables (fees, weight, sigops) being the sole data required for block templating, they become a subset. Miners would require in-house financial engineers capable of analyzing on-chain contracts and designing and deploying value extraction schemes. Miners that can recruit, partner with and/or fund the best teams would reliably outperform those that can not."

Think of miners as bodyguards. You want bruisers who will die defending you, not smarty-pants intellectuals who will stab you in the back.

You want miners competing physically on hashrate, not cognitively or computationally on block building. That's why you want to block anything that will enable miner extractable value or defi on bitcoin. smarter nodes, dumber miners: better bitcoin. 🤠💰

smarter miners, dumber nodes: worser bitcoin. 😱😭🔥💩

So, what to do about op_return?

IMHO greg maxwell and most of core are right about what to do, relax the standardness rules and treat op_return like any other transaction. It makes nodes smarter (about predicting the next block + fees), at the cost of more spam, but that's a tradeoff work making. It also reducing cognitive load for developers by eliminating a corner case.

Even if you disagree with this though, the important thing is to internalize this framework about WHY to prefer this or that change and what to prioritize.

For me, simplifying and streamlining and making for a consistent mempool is what should guide this debate.

KEEP MINERS DUMB AND STRONG, KEEP BITCOIN A FAIR AND FREE MARKET AND UNCENSORABLE.

My 2c.