If you look below the surface at what is going on it becomes pretty clear. Essentially one well funded Bitcoin company, Blockstream, has managed to hire a majority of the current top Bitcoin Core contributors. They also control discussion on a handful of the historically important forums for discussing Bitcoin and censor any comments critical of Core or supporting a blocksize increase. Blockstream has a business plan that revolves around providing private blockchain services. For whatever reason they feel like in order to be successful they need to limit Bitcoin's block size so that it is very expensive and inconvenient to use Bitcoin. They have 55 million in funding and probably feel like they have a lot at stake. Hence they are playing very dirty to try and kill Bitcoin's first mover advantage so they can essentially privatize Bitcoin under their corporate banner.
It would be like if AOL tried to kill the Internet by limiting packet size and line speed and then introduced AOL w/o the same limits.