If you can't pay people to work on things, open source is nowhere near as valuable because only programmers get to benefit from the ability to change the code.

And I guess that’s the disconnect. Regardless of how technically sound it is, people don’t like how it went down or how it looks. You CAN’T fix this with technical arguments or reason. It’s a public relations issue now. Core, as a group would need to publicly accept responsibility and acknowledge how it was mishandled. Apologise for blocking discussion around issues that were raised and walk the policy back if they want to ‘convince’ Knots users to go back. Focusing on the technical aspects just seems to create more division, as these threads demonstrate.