I have to confess I don't follow everything you've written, you are clearly more knowledgeable about the subject than me. OTOH it also doesn't sound like we have any major disagreements either, except it sounds like you are cautioning against running Knots, on the basis that it will have undesirable miner incentives, its tighter policies will be ineffective since Knots nodes are a tiny minority, and that hard-forking older clients (thanks for the link btw, eye-opening) will cause chaos?

None of that is ideal, but I will still take my chances with Knots. I simply do not trust or like Core right now, and this is my protest vote. I do not think they have been intellectually honest in their arguments. And even if there are negative consequences for miner incentives, it's probably just noise compared to the importance of Ocean. I'm going to do my part and start mining at home for Ocean. The forced-upgrade thing is interesting. It goes against the idea of self-sovereignty, and I hate being subjected to it (it's super annoying whenever I'm forced to update a banking or credit-card app on my phone, and this seems just like that), but there must be advantages as well (e.g. encouraging active participation). I am willing to accept this tradeoff for Knots because I see running the thing as an act of self-sacrifice – the important thing is what's good for the network, not what I want.

And yes, I do see some irony in that last statement, because one of the main battle cries of the pro-Knots crowd is that we should be able to control what goes in our own mempools :)

edit: I was just reminded that you said the forced obsolescence is optional. Even better :)