Gregory Maxwell,
Criticizing 148 without suggesting a specific alternative leaves the community in disarray.
I know you are emphasizing patience. But at the same time, with your patience we are allowing ourselves to get dicked for longer than necessary.
I think that core could easily develop code that could create a solid/reliable date/height based activation to allow miners to create SegWit block candidates and having nodes fully verify them. Shaolinfry is the only person Ive seen actually make such a proposal:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-April/014049.html. His makes it so that SegWit default gets activated at the end of the BIP9 signalling timeframe instead of default leaving it non-activated.
I agree that 148 is is not ideal. Non-SegWit signaling blocks are not a Denial of Service, given that other activation methods are available. Someone just needs to code something up that is better that we can all use in a satisfying time frame. So far 148 is the most practical and reliable method I'm aware of.
If 148 causes orphaning and a fork, I don't think such really matters in the long term. The non-SegWit miners will probably just quickly give up their orphans once they realize that money users like being able to have non-mutable TX IDs. If they do create a long lasting branch... well that is good too, I'd be happy to no longer have them in our community. Good luck to them in creating a competitive money, so that we can all enjoy lower transaction fees.
SegWit has already undergone enough testing. It is time to activate it.
Cheers,
Praxeology Guy