I was watching this sci-fi series, pretty cool btw (The expanse) and at some point, there's a character on a space station where they have crops for food and he says something about diversity that made me think about issues I've seen here in real life. As the plants were growing in an artificial environment, the system was very fragile, not as the ones we have here on earth. So once an imbalance appears, there are not enough routes to bring it back to equilibrium and it could easily collapse.

You don't need to be a scientist to observe that the lack of diversity is a dangerous situation when systems are exposed to external threats. I'm thinking particularly about an abomination that we do here with crops. Instead of having small patches of different crops where there is some diversity, with different trees, animals and insects, we just raze hundreds of kilometers of land and put the same thing on it! Where I live they've done that with sugar cane, palm oil and bananas. I always wonder why someone would do something so anti natural (stupid), it's kilometers of the same thing as far as the eye can see. Off course these things tend to get sick all at once and the risk of losing millions is very high, so the answer is to spread it with toxic chemicals or worse, create GMO's that can resist the chemicals, when the easy and natural answer would be to just plant different things, and also leave some trees and different plants to avoid the problem. This would create a system that is more robust and easily self regulates.

Well IMHO one way to look at the problem with the OP_RETURN thing is that most nodes are Core, I think it's up to 93% now, so really no diversity at all. As far as I understand, there wouldn't be such a problem if there were more diversity in nodes implementations used, basically because everyone would use different policies so no change in a single one would produce a system wide issue. Because we're lazy and most of us simply use Core, than when there's a change, it can have an impact on the whole system. I see that there are already some real proof-of-work fellows that take action and are now using Knots, this is the natural and easy solution to the problem.

All this is just to say that systems designed by humans tend to fail on the fact that we are always thinking about keeping control of them, but that is not how nature works. Nature is an extremely complex system, and that is why it self regulates and doesn't need intervention to keep its balance. So when we design systems, we should try to emulate nature, in a way to keep diversity and complexity, and not try to reduce it and simplify in order to keep control of it.