Your comment is perhaps true in a general sense. However, in the case of the Bitcoin core team, we're talking about a group of people who richly deserve to be unseated.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905118
Austin Hill, CEO of Blockstream, admits to committing fraud to scam people:
http://betakit.com/montreal-angel-austin-hill-failed-spectac...
Greg Maxwell, CTO of Blockstream, vandalizes pages on Wikipedia for fun:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Adminis...
Patrick Strateman, co-founder of Blockstream, has been accused of fraud/theft:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=159071.0
Luke-Jr, consultant to Blockstream claims the sun orbits the earth, slavery is okay, sodomy should be punished by death and that gay marriage is a logical impossibility.
http://forums3.armagetronad.net/viewtopic.php?p=203850#p2038...
https://np.reddit.com/r/bitcoin_uncensored/comments/492ztl/l...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Christianity/comments/48avz0/inform...
E.g. the Austin Hill example is from when the man was 16, and comes from a talk he gave about how he learned an important moral lesson from that moral failure that changed the course of the rest of his life.
Luke-JR seems to have --- special --- views of the world. Not sure if I would trust him with anything at all.
The dynamics don't work the same way as a traditonal FOSS fork. Perhaps getting mindshare first is the way.
Bitcoin Classic is the attempt to change the reference implementation from the Core code to their code, by only changing as little as possible (that is, raising the 1 MB blocksize to 2 MB).
The current problem is not being more open to other developers but to get a different reference implementation installed on full nodes and miners.
(It's worth noting that Bitcoin Core supporters have been DDOSing people running the various attempts at a "LibreOffice" that've been tried).
Bitcoin nodes get DDOSed from time to time-- e.g. people incorrectly believe they're the node for some service they think they can extort. Sometimes users on bufferbloat afflicted connections mistake other users fetching the chain from them as a DOS attack.
That said, since these claims that people are DDOSing "Bitcoin classic" were first made, I've had someone running a classic node-- in the hope of identifying the attacker-- which has received no attacks. I don't believe the claimed attacks are widespread if they're even happening at all.
I'm skeptical that the FOSS philosophy is the correct philosophy for anything which becomes harder to replace as it becomes more established.
In an ideal world, you'd split these up:
1. there'd be a currency steering committee (with some structure whose ideal form is above my pay-grade) that produces a machine-readable validity ruleset (sort of like a DTD or XML Schema);
2. and then there'd be a proliferation of competing clients that all know how to parse those rulesets, and use them to validate blocks; but which otherwise go about their business of being Bitcoin clients in entirely separate ways.
With such a split, issues with the management of "BitcoinCore the FOSS reference client implementation" wouldn't overlap with issues with "Bitcoin, the ruleset that, in being instantiated in a majority of nodes, gives them a consensus chain." Instead, the first would just be a regular code project, no longer at-all critical; and the second would be something more like the project of defining a new version of e.g. the ePub standard, or of drafting an RFC.
Now, many open source projects don't add new people to the core, decision-making team, but few open source projects are run by people who are acting in direct opposition to the [financial] interests of their userbase.
Just pointing out that that would still be an order of magnitude better than my current non-bitcoin options for forex/remittance ($100s, days).
If things are really so bad and Bitcoin is FOSS, why don't you (or whoever cares about rising the limit most) just fork the project and create Bitcoin 2.0. If this is truly best thing for the currency then everyone is bound to jump the ship and use your new currency.