I've made a conscious choice to install the non free packages. I'm quite happy I had that choice, but I'm even happier that they weren't forced on me.

I certainly hope nobody will point to me and say "look here, non-free should obviously be the default!"

Personally, while I would prefer to be able to change and replace the software running on the tiny computers that make up a modern system, focusing on the distinction between "the vendor shipped it on a flash chip so we don't have to think about it" and "we need to load it at runtime" seemed a bit like spending too much effort on too little reward, to me - if we convince the manufacturer to up the cost by a few cents to hide the firmware blob from us, is that really a victory for Free Software, simply because we don't have to think about it? (Particularly if it sometimes results in never having ready access to a mechanism to replace the firmware blob, should someone sufficiently motivated either convince them to Free it or develop a replacement?)

It's great whenever someone develops replacements bits or, even more rarely, convinces a company to release their firmware bits permissively, but without a list of examples of Debian's stance changing the policies of other organizations, I think it's not that effective a tool for changing behavior in this case, and instead primarily inconveniences people who want to use Debian.

Whether they end up changing the default behavior or not, people in this thread replying "wait, there are firmware-bundled images?" makes me think Debian should either stop making them or stop making them so unintuitive to discover.

The Web has plenty of tutorials explaining the installation process and the difference between the official ISO and the non-free ISO, even though I would love a better Debian Wiki.

Maybe it's a bit of gatekeeping, but popularity by itself shouldn't be the goal for Debian. You don't know how to install Debian, you don't want to search for a tutorial first, you won't let someone more knowledgeable to help you? Well, I believe this is not the best place for you, you'll face worse things on the road if you keep using Linux.

(But, of course, this isn't an uncompromisable principle, as evidenced by the existence of the non-free repository. Packaging basic firmware on the same image as the rest of the system isn't the unthinkable action that people are talking about, but silently running them would be.)