In any field, not just caving, it only takes a small minority of people (and I don't mean a minority faction on one side or other of the dispute) to fail to step back and look at the wider picture, for trouble to escalate. What happens is those few people generate a polarisation amongst the onlookers and a bandwagon effect kicks off. Before you know it, the silly dispute is linked to all sort of other issues like CRoW, respect for landowners, BCA constitutional issues, democracy or lack of it in cavers' representative bodies, and, who knows, Russian interference, Brexit and the merits of veganism.
All of this muddies the water so much that the most positive course of action required gets lost and ignored, cavers end up suffering years of mutual animosity, and nothing positive comes from it whatsoever. If caving ends up prohibited by the owners of the Draenen system, who could blame them, and in part the fault would lie with the very few who failed to see things in the wider perspective, but more crucially, take matters into their own hands and, let's face it, deliberately cause mischief.
There is absolutely no place for personal vilification when disagreements divide any part of society, caving, karate, or the WI. It achieves absolutely nothing.
And, with regard to those who are put off getting involved in the discussion, I suspect you are in a significant majority, I urge you to speak up and simply say "stop behaving like a dick" to those who appear to simply want to stir things up.
