We gave a full presentation on BIP-110 at Bitcoin Charlotte a few weeks ago, and we genuinely wrestled with whether to platform it at all. I thought it was a stupid proposal then. Watching it fail has been deeply unsurprising. Miner support peaked around 2.6% against a 55% threshold, the enforcing branch produced two blocks, and then it stalled while bitcoin continued normally.
The useful lesson is that changing bitcoin is incredibly hard by default. That is a feature. Anyone can write a proposal, run different software, make noise online, and try to rally users or miners. Turning that proposal into bitcoin requires broad technical, economic, and social coordination. BIP-110 never came close.
So-called spam can be annoying, ugly, and sometimes offensive. It is not materially impairing normal bitcoin use today, and fee-paying data has to compete for the same scarce block space as every other transaction. The productive response is driving bitcoin adoption. More monetary use creates more transaction demand, which raises the cost of low-value data and eventually prices much of it out. If you want less spam, help more people use bitcoin. Trying to fork the network over it was always the dumber path.