@awemany
I believe that is another oddity of small-block folk explained by the percieved need for "extreme consensus," the idea I've been going on about like a broken record recently.
*We* can compromise... or rather, we aren't even usually pretending that this is a negotiation, because Core should not be able to have any final power since they can just be forked away from.
The large block position strongly tends to be a position of "let the market decide [the consensus parameters]" (or rather, "Know that the market will ultimately decide, so stop wasting our time and get out of the way before you [Core] are pushed out of the way"). Thus our emphasis on competing implementations. Bitcoin Unlimited, in either the forced unlimited or user-selectable blocksize forms, is aimed at being the ultimate expression of that view. "Unbundle consensus parameters from the dev team. Stop hiding the underlying Schelling-point and market dynamics that ultimately decide the parameters."
When consensus parameters are tied to dev teams, and when Bitcoin is mistakenly believed to derive its monetary soundness from everyone staying in extreme consensus on *all* the rules of the system (not just the monetary rules), there is little room for compromise. For people who subscribe to this view, which seems to me to be almost all small blockers (to varying degrees), much more is at stake: many of them really seem to believe that a *change* that pisses off more than 5% of the people off would destroy Bitcoin completely, and even if less than that it would be damaging.
A *status quo* that pisses a lot of people off is not so bad to them, because even if a lot of people leave it would still not destroy Bitcoin, just lower the price, and they think they can wait it out. It's very silly they don't see the contradiction there, due to narrow code focus. But that's not the only reason. They have gaping holes in their understanding of market dynamics, largely because their arguments are regurgitated Core dev statements from people like Gmax. Theymos and many others follow the devs around on Bitcointalk and the mailing list, and parrot everything. (Do we parrot Gavin and Mike? Do we follow them around and make their points verbatim? Not often from what I've seen. A few large blockers parrot a few things, but it is far, far less than what I see from the small blocks side. Discovering the mailing list was like a master key; I could finally see where all the bullshit arguments on reddit were coming from, often repeated more or less verbatim.)
In short, they cannot compromise because status quo has for them incredibly strong pull, as they see the immutability of Bitcoin or at least extreme difficulty in changing it (not speaking of the ledger, nor of just the monetary rules, but all the current consensus rules!) as being the very bedrock of Bitcoin's value. Without it, they fear total destruction. Thus they are prepared to sacrifice a lot to "HOLD THE LINE." Most probably think only the most conservative and obvious changes will ever be possible, and they are apparently resigned to the rigidity and fragility that entails, even as Bitcoin faces dramatically changing threats and circumstances (thus some of them like Greg also tending to be less bullish overall).
