I guess a statement like yours and a counter like mine is difficult to back up with evidence, but if you look for some of the technical debates realted to SegWit, Bitcoin Unlimited, Bitcoin Classic, Emergent Consensus, etc, it's pretty obvious that the bitcoin core developers are well ahead of their opponents even in the realms of economics and politics.
Bitcoin has a lot of defenses to manipulative politics in place already, including the fact that it's intentionally very difficult to hardfork the newtork, and including the fact that releases follow a fixed schedule (which makes it much harder to shoehorn in features).
The characterization that the core devleopers focus primarily on code and traditional software engineering falls far short of the reality.