So basically XT is meant to be the "rich man's bitcoin" whereas bitcoin the original will now have a better chance at being utilized on a global scale.
I'm telling you guys, the entire reason crypto was interesting in the first place is because of its cost-cutting mechanisms. Digital money transfer has been around for a long, long time. It was just inordinately expensive and middle-manned to the max.
If its now cheaper to work with fiat (Facebook thinks it is) and you need a 1 Terabyte hard drive just to store your coin's blockchain, the coin no longer works to the benefit of those it was meant to help in the first place and is therefore useless.
Exactly. XT offers cheaper tx, but trustless fully contributing (access+verify+amplify) nodes only for the rich.
Bitcoin's tx are (slightly) more expensive, but it fits in a modest footprint attainable by Joe Sixcoins and his DSL in Florida/Africa/Venezuela.
In an emergency, Bitcoin's configuration maintains the fallback option of using hosts of last resort, located far out on the edges. That keeps the system diverse/diffuse/defensible/resilient.
As its requirements rise, XT excludes more actual and potential full contributors, leaving it increasingly at the mercy of centralized data centers' good wishes and SLA fulfillment abilities.
Now, who would want to not kill Bitcoin at the moment (because messy Striesand/Hydra Effects), yet make sure it can be killed without having to root it out of every low-bandwidth data haven in every jungle/warehouse/basement/office/coffeeshop in the world?