The emotional flashback against the definition of a planet was probably foreseeable, and I think the framing of it as a “demotion” was what makes people bitter to this day. People’s mental model still has an orrery of 9 objects spinning around the sun, with that last one “cast off” because it’s “too small”. That garners pity.

But note that mental model… it doesn’t even include Ceres. That got “kicked out of the club” too, and no one cares. Why? Because it’s part of the asteroid belt. That’s not a demotion, it’s a reassignment to something different but just as cool!

And yet….. that’s EXACTLY THE SAME CASE AS PLUTO. Pluto isn’t just the 9th and smallest object circling the sun far far away, it’s a member of the Kupier Belt! And that’s awesome, there’s a whole second belt! But Kupier is hard to pronounce from the spelling, and Kupier isn’t a sci-fi common word like asteroid…

Not to mention that using the adjective “dwarf” just sounds insulting.

Sigh. Pluto is definitely not a planet, but the terminology definition conference definitely screwed up the framing bad.