I always thought that Gavin had some kind of bizarre ideological or personality change. He had seemed like a wise, smart and good guy for a long time. Was that not so? As an outside observer, I'm genuinely curious.
I guess the thing to understand is that Gavin was (is?) a literal politician-- though only one at the small scale of his town government. He was extremely generous with the glad-handing. It was the norm for him to agree kindly with you in public and to your face while chasing a conflicting agenda in private.
It made for a reliably good initial impression but often lead to a bad relationship in the long term. Over time, you'd learn to recognize the coded language "Ok." meant "I disagree profoundly and I'm going gonna screw over this plan behind your back." and dread dealing with it.
So, for example, he'd disagree with something the development community was working on but instead of confronting it directly, he'd go to companies as a representative of the development community and advocate for his position (without disclosing that he alone held that position) but then come back and tell us that it was something the company was demanding. He even went as far as to recommend obscure altcoin developers to companies looking to employ a bitcoin devloper full-time, presumably to protect those relationships and maintain that leverage.
So essentially sticking himself in the middle of things and presenting himself as speaking for people he didn't speak for. This proxying went swimmingly when there was broad-spread agreement and rapidly turned into a mess when there wasn't.
As time goes on we continue to slowly learn more. For example, recently I learned that people were given highly edited copies of email chains between the active Bitcoin devs that eliminated most of the disagreement's with Gavin's positions, and falsely made it look like other people agreed with him in discussions where, in fact, no one agreed. It'll probably never be possible to tell if distortions like that were intentional or just a result of a profound tunnel vision that came from fundamentally not respecting other people's positions.
What you see as a change in ideology or personality I think was a combination of reaching a point where the web of appeasement couldn't be maintained anymore, where people who previously provided sound advice behind the scenes no longer cared to offer their council because they'd been alienated, and the stress and desperation as the plan he'd invested so much in was falling apart.
There were flashes of that long before, even extremely public ones like the infamous "Luke-jr is a toxic person" post that arose because luke steadfastly wouldn't support Gavin's position on what was mostly technical minutia. (Admittedly, Luke can be pig-headed and annoyingly impervious to political winds but that post was entirely inappropriate).
It made for a reliably good initial impression but often lead to a bad relationship in the long term. Over time, you'd learn to recognize the coded language "Ok." meant "I disagree profoundly and I'm going gonna screw over this plan behind your back." and dread dealing with it.
So, for example, he'd disagree with something the development community was working on but instead of confronting it directly, he'd go to companies as a representative of the development community and advocate for his position (without disclosing that he alone held that position) but then come back and tell us that it was something the company was demanding. He even went as far as to recommend obscure altcoin developers to companies looking to employ a bitcoin devloper full-time, presumably to protect those relationships and maintain that leverage.
So essentially sticking himself in the middle of things and presenting himself as speaking for people he didn't speak for. This proxying went swimmingly when there was broad-spread agreement and rapidly turned into a mess when there wasn't.
As time goes on we continue to slowly learn more. For example, recently I learned that people were given highly edited copies of email chains between the active Bitcoin devs that eliminated most of the disagreement's with Gavin's positions, and falsely made it look like other people agreed with him in discussions where, in fact, no one agreed. It'll probably never be possible to tell if distortions like that were intentional or just a result of a profound tunnel vision that came from fundamentally not respecting other people's positions.
What you see as a change in ideology or personality I think was a combination of reaching a point where the web of appeasement couldn't be maintained anymore, where people who previously provided sound advice behind the scenes no longer cared to offer their council because they'd been alienated, and the stress and desperation as the plan he'd invested so much in was falling apart.
There were flashes of that long before, even extremely public ones like the infamous "Luke-jr is a toxic person" post that arose because luke steadfastly wouldn't support Gavin's position on what was mostly technical minutia. (Admittedly, Luke can be pig-headed and annoyingly impervious to political winds but that post was entirely inappropriate).