Good point. At the moment, it does feel like you have to wait for someone to produce a patch that you can run. If there isn't one, it doesn't seem like you can do much beyond adding to the cacophony. 

Scoresby

totally agree that there doesn't need to be a single approach to soft forks, as seen with segwit and taproot using different mechanisms.

I guess what I'm getting at is that many plebs who run their own nodes don't know how to make their opinion heard in the consensus process. All I see is a cacophony of opinions online, but no sense of how popular any proposal actually is. If there was a way to gauge people's opinions of BIPs through highly visible polls I think that would be a good thing.

bitcoin

Should we stop relying on Bitcoin Core to introduce soft forks?

totally agree that there doesn't need to be a single approach to soft forks, as seen with segwit and taproot using different mechanisms.

I guess what I'm getting at is that many plebs who run their own nodes don't know how to make their opinion heard in the consensus process. All I see is a cacophony of opinions online, but no sense of how popular any proposal actually is. If there was a way to gauge people's opinions of BIPs through highly visible polls I think that would be a good thing.