Dankrad and Peter Szilagyi discussing MEV

So I think your criticism sounds like you think we are designing the protocol to satisfy monetary interests rather than to build a fair system. I can assure you that this is absolutely not how any researcher thinks. Many of us go heavily against the grain and take a lot of flak for opposing big ecosystem players. Our life would be much easier if we weren't working as hard as possible to keep the protocol decentralized an censorship free. I could do without being hated by all the liquid staking protocol (and the same for the people who just stuck their heads out to suggest taking the issuance curve). And yet we are all still doing it. To take just one example of your points, it's absurd to say that verkle is to protect staker's income. Especially for the staking pools, they don't care at all about not needing an SSD to run the protocol. The main point is to make it easier and cheaper to run full nodes, while being able to increase gas to allow easier access to Ethereum for all.