Myself and all my bot developer friends think he's being a bit of a crybaby and wanting things his way. Discord gives very very nice allowances and tools to developers, I wish more companies were even half as good as discord is in this regard. They're adding more and more features, improving things, fixing things, doing developer Q&As, etc, what more can you ask of them? The message content intent is considered by nearly everyone to be a good, needed change, although it is a nuisance (i.e having to rewrite and refactor a lot). I'm not even attempting to apply for the intent because of the respect I have for privacy, I don't want (or need) it.
The message content intent only prevents rule-abiding bots from reading message content. I can be trivially bypassed by anyone actually wanting to scrape message content using a regular account...