I’ll finish with a quote from “On Consensus and Humming in the IETF”, where the IETF explains why horse-trading compromises has no place in consensus-driven decision making:

Unfortunately, the word “compromise” gets used in two different ways, and though one sort of compromising to come to consensus is good (and important), the other sort of compromising in order to achieve consensus can actually be harmful. As mentioned earlier, engineering always involves balancing tradeoffs, and figuring out whether one engineering decision makes more sense on balance compared to another involves making engineering “compromises”. Those sorts of compromises are among engineering choices, and they are expected and essential.

However, there is another sense of “compromise” that involves compromising between people, not engineering principles. For example, a minority of a group might object to a particular proposal, and even after discussion still think the proposal is deeply problematic, but decide that they don’t have the energy to argue against it and say, “Forget it, do what you want”. That surely can be called a compromise, but a chair might mistakenly take this to mean that they agree, and have therefore come to consensus. But really all that they’ve done is capitulated; they’ve simply given up by trying to appease the others. That’s not coming to consensus; there still exists an outstanding unaddressed objection. Again, if the objection is only that the choice is not ideal but is otherwise acceptable, such a compromise is fine. But conceding when there is a real outstanding technical objection is not coming to consensus.

Even worse is the “horse-trading” sort of compromise: “I object to your proposal for such-and-so reasons. You object to my proposal for this-and-that reason. Neither of us agree. If you stop objecting to my proposal, I’ll stop objecting to your proposal and we’ll put them both in.” That again results in an “agreement” of sorts, but instead of just one outstanding unaddressed issue, this sort of compromise results in two, again ignoring them for the sake of expedience.

These sorts of “capitulation” or “horse-trading” compromises have no place in consensus decision making.