Forks of a single block ("orphans") are expected due to block propagation taking a nonzero amount of time. That's very different than the case where say 50% of

Forks of a single block ("orphans") are expected due to block propagation taking a nonzero amount of time. That's very different than the case where say 50% of the network is running bitcoind, and the other 50% is running btcd, and some transaction triggers an edge case in either implementation that causes one implementation to accept the transaction and another to reject it. I think multiple compatible implementations would be great to have, but we don't have them at the moment, and in the meantime companies handling huge numbers of bitcoin transactions need a solution that works today. So I applaud the bitcoin-core team for catering to the increasingly common use case of using bitcoind only for consensus.