I'm not really interested in spending time debating this topic with Andrachy because he is not a dev who understand the details about these systems. Nothing he's said since changes my mind on this subject. I just felt compelled to respond briefly because you directly asked me to.

I've written about the reasons for our approach from early on and my reasons why I think that layer 1 smart contracts are bad. From his latest response referencing this as a "missing feature", it is clear that he's never bothered to read that even. This doesn't surprise me, but I think it's a mistake to attack our architecture without even reading the design ideas that led to it.

Finally, I do think he's biased on this subject, and I think it is fair game to mention it. And yes, he can point out that I'm a large stakeholder in Hive, but that is ultimately because I believe in the design, not vice-versa. So a more accurate description of my bias would be "it's my design".