@OP - the reason why that guy is able to post in the
Important Announcements section is because he donated 50
BTC to become a VIP some number of years ago. VIPs are able to post in that section once per week unless there is an important security related announcement in which case they can post more frequently.
BU, like Bitcoin core is open software (I anticipate that BU will remain open source over the long run), and users are free to modify the code as they wish. If the community as a whole (and the economy) wishes to use a Bitcoin that has in excess of 21 million coins, then there is no reason why they should not be able to do this. One person's desire to use a coin with a specific consensus rule does not force others into adhering to these same rules.
Further, the position of one prominent BU developer does not necessarily reflect the position of BU as a whole, nor all BU supporters. This is similar to how just because Greg Maxwell aka nullc aka Gmaxwell, the CTO of blockstream, and a prominent figure within "Core",
vandalized Wikipedia does not mean that other Core supporters support this kind of behavior, nor that all other Core supporters actively vandalize Wikipedia as Gmaxwell did.
2. dynamics does not give control to miners. remember its segwit that bypassed node consensus going soft.
Softforks are optional. Nobody are forced to use them. Does not require concensus, but in any case, segwit won't activate without 95% miner support (BU is 75%), or UASF.
Softforks are not optional if you wish to be able to validate incoming transactions and/or validate blocks. Further, a user who has not "upgraded" after a soft fork may result in a user trying to send a transaction they believe to be valid that will never confirm for seemingly no reason. Unless a user agrees to run the most recent version of software written by a third party they may or may not trust and/or agree with, a user will have difficulty being made aware of a soft fork. With soft forks, users are forced to abide by the new rules, regardless of if they agree with them, or even if they are aware of them.
A hardfork on the other hand, will make it very obvious to a user that a change has been made because he is no longer receiving valid blocks, alerting him that he needs to investigate the changes the hard fork made, and if he agrees, to upgrade. It will be very expensive to attempt to trick someone who has not upgraded into accepting a transaction that gets confirmed on an old chain because finding a block will cost roughly that of a block reward (~14 BTC currently) and both the fact that there is a significant drop-off in transaction volume, and a block being found >2 hours after the prior block should both setoff red flags (if a block is found more than a 1/2 day after the prior block, a red flag bright enough should be setoff that he should consider the block invalid, especially if he does not receive subsequent blocks).
For the above reasons, I believe soft forks to be
more dangerous than hard forks.
3. having diverse nodes like bitcoinj, classic, xt, bitcoinruby, btcd and a dozen others means that if one codebase has a bug. the network continues as proven by when bu was hit the other diverse codebases continued.
bitcoinj isn't a full node.
A full node is generally considered to be something that has validated all blocks from the first block to present, validates all transactions as it receives them, and validates all future blocks as it receives them.
I would be surprised if most major businesses do not use their own custom full node software with special security settings to protect themselves from various attacks, including sybil attacks.
There is no reason why Wladimir J. van der Laan should have the authority to solely determine exactly what goes into full node software.
That link actually says that 35% of companies polled support SegWit, and an additional 35% of companies are ready for it. Further, companies are listed on that website regardless of economic transaction volume, or if a company is actually a Bitcoin related company. There are several blockchain "consulting" companies, and other companies that likely do less than $2,000 in monthly business that are given equal weight to companies that do tens/hundreds of millions worth of dollars of business every day. For example,
this Canadian "exchange" listed on coin.dance that supports SW and opposes Bu, has a ~9% spread, which is greater than what would be expected on LBC, I think this actually might just be one person who trades bitcoin locally in Canada -- this guy has the same weight as Coinbase.
I would not give very much weight to these kinds of polls.
edit: it actually looks like this poll is giving extra weight to some very small players, for example -ck who authored CGminer (I am not even sure if this is even used anymore), and ckpool which has ~1% of the network hadhrate running on it.