I think the consensus protocol is absolutely not under control of 5 maintainers. Convince a few of the miners and exchanges (e.g., f2, ant, bitfury, coinbase, blockchain.info, bitstamp) to actually start running classic and we'll have 2MB blocks on the longest chain in no time. Conversely, suppose those 5 maintainers release a hard fork version of segwit tomorrow without a block size increase--nobody would upgrade.

The consensus protocol is dictated by exactly that, consensus, not this allegedly omnipotent cabal.