I believe the market should have solved this on their own.
Einstein, what do you think happened?
All those claiming that the market sorted itself out, you have a valid point and I mostly agree. The market did sort itself out.
I just have one question: what would have happened if there had been no time-sensitive discussions among developers? What if the new version were released and the developers would not have had discussions as to what should miner do or not do?
I'm genuinely curious if the miners would have reverted to the old chain. Again, I don't think anything "wrong" happened, only that I think the miners of 0.8 should have stayed on 0.8, making other miners understand that it's not the software that determines what's good or bad, it's simply that your software has to speak the same language that the majority of software speaks. Hence, a protocol. Perhaps they thought that moving forward with the new chain would be detrimental to the future of bitcoin and the future of their mining enterprise. I'm just curious.
There is another threat suggesting the documentation and "formalisation" of the protocol, some of the devs are reluctant as it means lots of work lots and lots of documentation for something that will probably change dramatically over time and the fact that whoever writes the protocol is doing so as a small elite so to speak.
"The protocol" is the language which most software understands. Nobody "writes" the protocol, just as nobody "writes" the English language. If everyone starts using this new word like "tweeting" then that's now part of the English language. Even if no "small elite" determined it. Like you said, the original client is the protocol - but not because that they are writing it, simply because they are the only ones speaking this language. To decentralize you simply need more people speaking the language.