Concur on most points.
I support informed consensus, insofar as it would succeed in restoring some previously built-in privacy features.
Simple voting as it's happening here and at Savannah, is not necessarily democracy, because without any proper discussion, it's often uninformed, and becomes simply a vote by majority, especially when a bad decision gets made.
There are also people, who do use IceCat, but who don't vote, and who don't partake in discussions in this list and elsewhere. The same applies to users of upstream, but on a scale greater by orders of magnitude. When something wrong happens to upstream, it's impossible to turn it back, and users discover fairly late when useful functionality has been removed or when bloat has been added.
There are things that should be in addons, and then there are things that should not be. For example, cookie prompt code should be returned, stay built-in, and be developed further. This would resolve an upstream regression and increase the user base. If done right, more distros would then pick IceCat as the defaut browser.
Whilst NoScript is an independently-developed add-on used by other Gecko-based projects and should therefore stay as is.
wrt future IceCat, then instead of any one adblocker, NoScript should be bundled, as it has a compatible license, it offers better security, and most ads are blocked along the way, too. Some distros do that bundling already. Choosing an adblocker is then up to each user and their preference.
-M.