SegWit is controversial because it is a key part of Core's off-chain scaling roadmap, as opposed to alternative, on chain scaling. It's pure politics: If SegWit "wins", we go down a certain route of scaling and cement Core as being the only group that has control over Bitcoin's future. There are some technical arguments against SegWit but they are largely unrelated to what makes it so controversial.
> Blockstream employed 5(?) Core devs, some of them part-time.
If you omit the arguable "blockstream have paid", the rest of the sentence is correct: almost every developer of bitcoin core pushes Segwit without clear consensus from the community.
They define "consensus" as a consensus between those who reside in (and who have not been ejected from) their tightly controlled forums.
> Censorship is horrible, but do you have proof that Blockstream supports it?
Adam Back and Greg Maxwell (CEO and CTO) regularly participate in the forums that support the censorship, i.e. /r/bitcoin, and rarely post on /r/btc
(for a starting overview of the censorship, see here: https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-histor... )
Is the CEO and CTO choosing to participate often and primarily in a heavily censored community not "support"?