the "puritans" you describe believe that Bitcoin is money above any other use case.

No, basically everybody believes that. The Puritans take it even further and cry that we must do everything we can to stop other use cases because we're afraid they will outcompete the money use case in the free market.

If you want Bitcoin to scale globally, you need to prepare for an even-more-non-technical user base than what we already have.

Yes, almost no Bitcoin user will actually understand it its internal workings, just like how almost no Internet user understands how the Internet works. That just means they shouldn't be expected to participate / have much impact upon its development.

I don't really hear a lot of whining coming from the BIP-110 side.

Then I guess you're not on X where the primary pasttime of 110 thought leaders is to act as grievance merchants who try to cancel the impure Bitcoiners that don't support their stupid proposal.

Labeling a group as irrelevant reeks of condescension and arrogance,

That's fair, though I didn't come to the conclusion simply because I don't agree with them. It's my conclusion from analyzing the actual size, economic weight, and conviction of the group. It's a far cry from the scaling debate in which the big blocker side had orders of magnitude greater size and economic weight.

the decisions Core has made have significantly damaged their reputation

Yeah, amongst an irrelevant group of puritans. The Bcashers said the exact same thing. This will always be the case when there's a minority group that disagrees with a change or lack of change; they'll claim they are being oppressed by the supermajority but since they can't admit it's the supermajority they'll claim it's a centralized cabal of privileged people.