May I suggest that we don't merge the RBF changes?
The community clearly is not happy with recent changes in Core. There is appetite for a new reference client and this is the chance to launch. Have we approached Gavin?
I would suggest going a step further and have the client reject any transaction flagged as RBF by not rebroadcasting the transaction. If enough clients did this RBF transactions would propogate slowly or not at all. RBF transactions are completely against satoshi's vision for bitcoin.
Regarding the price action, I think it is exciting to see, but if bitcoin cannot find a way to route around the current attack then regardless of what the price does we have real long term problems.
If Peter is able to break zero-confirm transactions just like that, and most users and miners continue to run the blockstream client, then bitcoin looks to be a lot less anti-fragile than I originally though, with centralized development as the attack vector.
Since they look dead set to move forward with this horrible change, then I think we will find out but the end of the year just how anti-fragile bitcoin is. I hope it successfully routes around this, but for the first time have my doubts...