Nah, this is a terrible example. Bitcoin Core was quite right to not go down the path of more filters. It's hopeless to stop these protocols as long as they're willing to pay fees. Ultimately filters are a form of censorship. And censorship can only work if all means of communication are censored. It's trivial for the people to bypass filters, eg by running a fork like my Libre Relay: https://github.com/petertodd/bitcoin/tree/libre-relay-v27.1 If you want to see Libre Relay in action, try out https://opreturnbot.com/ with a >80 bytes message. It will get mined. Bitcoin Core is a bit of a pretend meritocracy. But not for this reason.