One problem is that people like @hodlonaut BIP110 don't understand that open source software always leads to *apparent* centralization

@Luke Dashjr made a pull request to Bitcoin Core just in January, to fix some issues with 29.x https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/34370

Thanks Luke! The point I'm making is that these are not distinct groups of engineers, working separately on isolated independent codebases, with no permission to contribute across projects. The reality is very different

Stop thinking of this like it's Apple-vs-Microsoft or Android-vs-iOS. In open source, the barriers to switching to the better repository are much lower than you think

If Core v30 was controversial among the devs that aren't already working on Knots, any one of them could trivially have forked it to have whatever change they wanted

When anybody makes a pull request to one project that improves it, they can easily make the same PR to multiple projects, or a third party can copy and paste the change

We have lots of great code, and lots of great engineers, now supercharged by AI. Once one repository earns the track record of accepting the best PRs, it naturally becomes the center of attention. It *appears* centralized, but it can trivially move to another repository if the other repository is better