I'm on team Pluto here but no, the problem was that Mike Brown found like a dozen 'planets' and no one wanted to deal with that. It was closer to preventing someone from making a name for themselves.

It was fine and dandy until Eris came along.

Eris is bigger than Pluto, so if Pluto’s a planet then so is Eris. So you have 10 planets.

And then how many other Erises are still hiding? How many planets do we have then? It must be some very large unknown number!

Holding the true number of planets to be a large unknown number was anathema to many.

The demotion of Pluto was primarily motivated by a desire for the word “planet” to refer to a fixed, never-changing number of large bodies orbiting the sun.

The issue is that when we discovered Pluto we thought it was much bigger than it turned out to be. If it was as big as they thought then sure it would be a planet. As it is it isn’t even the most massive dwarf planet

How to keep Pluto as a planet but say larger objects than it that also orbit the sun aren't planets, is the question I guess?

My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine...uhhhm... !?

The problem with demoting it lies in its beauty. Pluto is beautiful and interesting. We want it to be important. But instead of being the "last of the planets", maybe instead it should be the first of the dwarf planets.

> someone was trying to make a name for themselves

100%

Scientists try to coin new terms all the time. It’s great for the researcher if people actually use it. But why do that when you can just sign your name on a term everyone already uses?

Redefining “planet,” from the 9 culturally accepted symbols into something else, was a swindle. “Things that clear their orbits” could have been TTCTOs. It happens all the time, coining precise terms for things. Why should this one have been any different? The public was right to push back and to protect their mythology.