there WAS politics. in the form of consensus, which was a feature built by satoshi to allow on-network voting to allow competing idea's to find a compromise that would suite the whole community and if the high majority of the community agreed then the network upgrades to that new feature.
however. core team assured that they had veto power and methods to avoid politics.
last year at the bilateral split. where bitcoin core political party(fanboys) went in the direction of segwit/ln/offchain. and the opposition were thrown in the other direction.
democratic consensus was not used to activate segwit. this is because the core political party only had 35% of the vote(prior to the bilatral split(civil war)). so instead of accepting they did not get their rule set into bitcoin law, they decided to go to civil war by making 2 opposing states so that all the core political fans went to one state and the others went to another state. thus in the core state, it would "appear" that core got its 95% vote. but the only voters allowed to vote after the bilateral split were core friendly.. thus the fair consensus mechanism was abused.
meaning anyone that loves cores political statement (the roadmap) can stay in there boys club and anyone who ever opposes core or decides later to change their loyalty away from being core loyal to not being core loyal will be thrown out.
this is why core has centralised the core network. where by things like Fibre ensure the only blocks that get broadcast to the general public are the core following rules. this is why the general public do not see any orphans being passed around
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-orphaned-blocks?timespan=1yearbecause everyone on the core network is sheep followin the exact rules or will get banned from the network if they ever tried to use democratic consensus feature built by satoshi that meant to allow on-network competition offering an different option for people to vote for or against..
yep cor ensured that its their rule or get banned