This argument is made often, but it’s a bad argument, because it basically boils down to one truth. You just want to hold everybody back, just so you can continue rowing your boat. Even if those people don’t have fun rowing a boat and just do it out of necessity.
That being said. It can still work, because a lot of people have a very strong opinion on the RDF or the motor boat in your metaphor. Those people will avoid the motor boat at all cost and you will still have people to pick from in order to row your boat over the river. Will it be a smaller pool than now? Yes it will. But if you consider that it’s impossible for people now to row their boat over the river, because they lack the time or in their city there are only few people interested in rowing and even less captains and those few only ever pick the strongest people to row, so the ones, they think are weak will get left out.
Which results in people just standing on the riverbank for hours asking passersby to row with them and still only manage to fill 4/5 seats at max with no captain found. Which results in wasted time, because they couldn’t do anything else while begging passersby to row with them and in the end they didn’t even get to the other side.
So the motor boat is a great solution. The ones that like to row or just hate motorboats still can row. They are not forced to use the motorboat and they will have a pool of like minded to row with them.
It could result for them in the same problems, that others experience now, that they won’t be able to fill a boat because they lack people. But then they still could use the motorboat to get to the other side.
So they do have a chance to cross the river, even if they don’t like the vehicle, whereas without the motorboat the others have no chance to cross the river.
Thank you for the great metaphor, that works perfectly in favour for the RDF. From now on I will use this, when people keep making the argument, that the RDF isn’t optional.