> Was this meant in response to what I wrote or did you mean to post this elsewhere in the thread? If the former, I'm not sure what am I supposed to do with this.

You wrote:

  You may notice that opinions are like assholes: everyone 
  has theirs. They're literally just "thoughts and feelings". 
  They may masquerade as arguments from time to time, much to 
  my dismay, but rest assured: there's nothing to "refute", 
  debate, or even dispute on them. Not in general, nor in 
  this specific case either.

I provided analysis supporting my position that the project maintainers most likely did not make this policy based on "literally just 'thoughts and feelings'" and, instead, made an informed policy based on experience and rational discourse.

I am not a Gentoo maintainer so cannot definitively state possibility #3 is what happened. Maybe one or both of the other two possibilities is what transpired. I doubt it, but if you have evidence refuting possibility #3, please share so we may all learn.

An informed opinion is still an opinion. Voting itself is an expression of opinion, which they participated in - if it merely followed logically, it wouldn't have needed to be voted upon. Mind you, the "experience and rational discourse" is not presented, not in the policy, not in the excerpts and link you just provided.

In order to "refute" their entire position, if we accept that to even make sense (I do not), I'd need to either prove them wrong about what their opinions are (nonsense), or show evidence they were actually holding a different opinion that ran contrary to what they shared (impossible, their actual opinion is known only to them, if that). There's very little "logical payload" to their published policy, if any. It's a series of opinions, and then a conclusion. Hence my example with the person not liking a given TV show, but stating their distaste as a fact of the world.

> I doubt it, but if you have evidence refuting possibility #3, please share so we may all learn.

Why am I being rhetorically coerced into engaging with something from a false set of options of your imagination, exactly?

> I provided analysis supporting my position that the project maintainers most likely did not make this policy based on "literally just 'thoughts and feelings'" and, instead, made an informed policy based on experience and rational discourse.

That position would look better if they hadn't relied so heavily on feelings to justify the announcement:

>> Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water.

>> The advertising and use of AI models has caused a significant harm to employees [which ones?] and reduction of service quality.

>> LLMs have been empowering all kinds of spam and scam efforts.

There is no experience or rational discourse involved there.