I am very sympathetic to the multiple implementations argument.

But I also am a big fan of how many eyeballs are focused on core. The odds that core ships some horrible thing AND it gets widely adopted without someone noticing are low.

I wonder how we get another implementation up to roughly equal review. Knots and libbitcoin have been around for a long while and are still one or two person projects.

Perhaps one of them becoming the vehicle for championing a soft fork would be a shortcut to dramatically ramping up their developer base.