It's exactly what we see in political elections for a reason: moderates pick a side (or a side picks them), a majority is formed, and consensus is reached.
The kind of political 'consensus' we tend to get in western Democracies is usually not consensus at all; feels more a fractalization of people into increasingly smaller camps that can't possibly hope to be represented by two parties' 'consensus.'
The phenomenon of groups coalescing based on trivial, lowest-common-denominator issues, as it was mentioned, often into two polarizing camps, may be a product of how humans psycology works. The convenience of thinking dualistically at the micro-level, as with most things, mirrors what goes on in bigger picture dramas, the convenience of having two-choices (red or blue, Knots or Core etc). Dualistic belief systems in ancient history1 show us that this mode of thinking is a pesky bugger that is impossibly hard to shake from our genetic makeup.
Overall, I agree with your conclusion that working through these tough questions of right and wrong can result in deepening our understanding of how we interface with these questions, if gone about in a civilized way.
Footnotes
interestingly the use of binary code also mirrors this psychological tendency of 'splitting' ↩
Footnotes