Why is knots cooler? I’ve read arguments both ways.

Many people think Bitcoin Core is compromised, I don't know the technical details comparing them both other than the human side. I do know I am with the Ocean/DATUM, Bitcoin Knots, FixtheFilters side of the world . To me Bitcoin's Timechain should not be filled with Dick Butts but sadly I am in the minority. Spent my entire career in BI where I wrote most of my code around GIGO because people didn't care about the data until you send them the garbage in their CSV or Excel files and it screwed up their Macros or charts. (...and they would call me regardless so I just coded around it all. Some in Bitcoin Core call that censorship though? Makes no sense to me.)

Interesting, I’ll have to read more about it. I have read a lot of criticism about Ocean not really being decentralized, and the main dude digging on Public Pool a lot.

Yeah, sorting out personality versus vision/functionality is tough for sure. Building your own templates and having too few of the pools being way too centralized is a problem. I think Ocean is 1% , again, I am a hack on this stuff since the Bitcoin is many rabbit holes, not just one.

So many rabbit holes. I run Public Pool on Umbrel (for simplicity) with Bitaxes.

Exactly what I am doing, but I do have the instructions to setup Bitaxe to point to Ocean/DATUM and apparently the hardest part of that was setting up Bitcoin Knots. I pinned to X how ridiculously easy that Bitcoin Knots process actually was, literally 3 clicks and about 2 days of waiting. I smoke a lot of meat, it was so easy.