I was having a side conversation with @Eric regarding this. I consider myself to be pretty scientific process-oriented and it’s one of the things I enjoy about SCRF as well. As MEV gets brought up often, I’m interested in us as a community sorting through what are “settled” questions versus open questions regarding MEV.
From my understanding so far, it appears that this is ultimately about gas price. Claim 1 is that higher gas prices are a generally negative thing. This seems to be the consensus of the space.
Claim 2 is that MEV strongly contributes to higher gas prices. Maybe not its existence, but as a practice in in situ. There doesn’t seem to be as much consensus about this, so maybe this is still an open question. For example, the post Discussion Post: Flashboys to Flashbots seems to give some voice to both sides of this issue. I think the open question here has to do with the manner of how MEV (or maybe if) contributes to gas price increases.
Claim 3 is a little more generic. I think of it more of a “X solves the MEV problem.” type of claim structure. For example, “TEX solves the MEV problem” (Research Post: TEX - A Securely Scalable Trustless Exchange. I think these are the types of general claims that we can be discussing and evaluating that help answer questions like what @jmcgirk asked above.
Ultimately, I’m interested in this discussion because it seems like MEV occupies the mind of and drives the decision-making of several projects and initiatives. I would even make the cautious argument that changes like EIP 1559 could be analyzed as being a response to MEV concerns.