Coinbase's XT project is basically a bitcoin modified specifically to make them profit. And wasnt bitcoin supposed to be decentralised?
That seems pretty silly. Profit would come by growing their userbase, not by trying to reduce their tx fee expenses which are probably extremely minimal. They make profit through trading fees using their own internal off-blockchain transaction ledger. People use their service because people trust them, they are integrated with multiple services such as Lawnmower and now USAA, they have insurance and FDIC on cash deposits, a multi-sig vault, and multi-layer 2FA (MFA).
I believe their support for BIP101 has more to do with their vision of Bitcoin being able to accommodate more transactions per second. This improves the user experience of Bitcoin because more transactions can be fit into each block, thus speeding up confirmation times.
We are all on the same side here when it comes to Bitcoin, the question is how do we maintain decentralization without decreasing usability of Bitcoin. As most have pointed out, if Bitcoin doesn't scale soon, there could be a catastrophic scenario where the price plummets, along with hashrates, and the ecosystem becomes so fragile that altcoins step in.
We all need to work together to ensure that Bitcoin is the clear winner and I hope Bitcoin Core devs can prove they have what it takes to bring the community together by working together to find consensus on controversial BIPs.