There is something that could be called "central planning" where a central plan is chosen by the market, which makes it actually not central planning in the common vernacular (where someone makes a plan and *doesn't* give the market a choice). For example, Satoshi's choice of 21M coins was that kind of "central planning," and Core/Classic/BU keeping the coin cap at 21M is also that kind of "central planning." That is not necessarily bad. It's only bad if there isn't an option to fork away... yet there always is.
In fact, from that perspective nothing Core does is really the bad kind of central planning, because the market can always choose to take it or leave it - or take parts of it and not other parts. Where Core errs is by acting like people are attacking Bitcoin by forking away from Core. They should thus be called market participants who present their proposals in bad way because they think of themselves as central planners.
Moreover, they don't leave users a choice to modify the consensus parameters, which is basically just a convenience barrier: users that want to change the parameters have to find another fork that has the changes they want, or modify the code themselves. Core doesn't see this as a problem because the convenience barrier helps ensure Extreme Consensus. It is in fact a problem for them, because in the future users will see this as a bad implementation. They will choose implementations that give them control, rather than trying to railroad them into a choice handed down from on high.
This again shows what a weak reed Extreme Consensus is to lean on. Does Core really expect a convenience barrier to stop people from modding their code when we are at trillion-dollar market caps?
BU is thus ahead of its time. It doesn't buy into the Extreme Consensus mantra. Instead it says the market will find consensus on Schelling points because it is overwhelmingly profitable to do so, and those Schelling points will set consensus parameters at whatever point the market finds to be value-maximizing.
Thus we neither need Extreme Consensus to keep Bitcoin unchanging as a protection against populism, nor in the form of a centralized dev team to set the changes from on high in order to ensure convergence on common consensus parameters. Extreme Consensus is an economically ignorant, naive, rigid, fragile, and utterly worthless way to view how Bitcoin maintains its value. It is a misunderstanding that must be clarified - either by explanation or by the market demonstrating it false and unnecessary, causing the believers of this mantra to lose their shirts.
