I'm familiar enough now about why the core people dislikes 2X. But, why was this accepted in the first place?
It never was accepted by Core. A block size increase requires a hard fork, which will result in two separate chains with the same blockchain until the point of the fork. This fork will be created by different developers.
It's just that, in order to reach the 95% of miner consensus that the original SegWit (BIP141) required to activate, the owners of most of the hashrate had a meeting in which they came up with the New York Agreement (NYA). NYA involves activating SegWit on the condition that three months after SegWit activation, the signatories will follow the new chain with 2MB base blocks.
So it appears that my "legacy" node is storing short blocks if the witness data is being stripped out. If this is true, then it would appear to kill the whole pont of implementing SegWit, and deprive me of the advantages in using SegWit for its many other features.
Yeah. SegWit was pretty much supposed to be a block size increase that didn't force people to upgrade and use it if they didn't want to. It preserves the ability to run a BTC node with a 1MB max block size, but that would be a legacy node/old node.