Bitcoin has -- perhaps feature, not bug -- an incredibly toxic and unsupportive adversarial culture.

One man's solution for a concrete problem is another man's you are going to destroy bitcoin you evil fuck.

I think this process is highly succeptible to social attack whereby -- if our standard is unanimity -- a few bad actors aimed at freezing bitcoin development to a standstill can have that effect.

I also think a number of the community things can have a net negative impact. E.g., we have no development foundation formally, so most feature upgrades are single-dev efforts that then are reviewed on a casual basis by other devs who have an interest. There's less grand vision / knowledge of where the puck is going and more wisdom of the crowds. Maybe that's OK, but we don't produce useful artifacts as a part of that process oftentimes. E.g., formal security audits, minimal implementations, etc.

Generally I think we should culturally trim down Bitcoin core to the bare minimum for efficient consensus (get rid of a bunch of wallet stuff, gui stuff, etc) and then use a small-step semantic change process to iterate on adding things as easy to verify refinements.

However, because some view soft forks themselves as being incredibly high risk, small steps are seen as not worth it compared to kitchen sink approaches for adding new stuff. And advocating for frequent small soft forks is akin to asking for bitcoin to be attacked regularly!

I don't have the answers, like I said. I just wish there were a way forward where less animosity was held for differing views.