Gavin seems to be the major sticking point. The other devs seem to do reasonably well and everyone expects Todd to be a chronic pain-in-the-ass (as well as being very much worth paying attention to.)
If Gavin moves over to Hearn's XT project to work on datacenter scaling for 'peer' status, state-issued passport identity stuff, coin blacklisting, etc like he threatens then it's pretty much 'problem solved' for a while it seems to me.
edit: slight
Regardless, given no consensus in the development community, client code supporting both sides of the disagreement should be released.
If that manifests via Hearn's XT project that is acceptable; given the "patch" nature of the project.
However, a forced release of the core client (quite possibly with other improvements piggy-backed as "pork"), distributed via "official" channels such as bitcoin.org, without development consensus, would be a clear indication of political decision making.
I think most people likely agree with Gavin's consistent statements that the core development team has no place in the political discussion.
If the community believes this to be a politically charged debate, I expect there will be much greater challenges ahead.
- Clearly define the ideals, in priority order, that the given code base will follow.
- Execute on those priorities.
- Let consensus sort it out; as it should be.
