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Considering the legalistic, procedural nature of Thursday’s Hoopili hearing at the Land Use Commission, there were a lot of people there.

It wasn’t an accident.

While the meeting did have a real result — the commission agreed to hear developer D.R. Horton-Schuler Homes’ petition to build nearly 12,000 homes on more than 1,500 acres of prime Ewa farm land — its conclusion was hardly a surprise.

The project stalled two years ago because the proposal failed to clear some procedural hurdles — not because commissioners deemed it an unworthy use of farm land. The agenda Thursday focused on whether the new proposal cleared those procedural hurdles; it did.

Now the LUC will convene to discuss the merits of the project.

Why, then, did so many people — easily dozens and probably more than a hundred — show up early to wave signs along both sides of Beretania Street and pack the small meeting room?

Optics.

Opponents, who say the development will undermine efforts to have Hawaii grow more of its own food and will exacerbate traffic woes, hoped to show that public opinion is on their side. Turnout at a neighborhood board meeting on the matter last week had been overwhelmingly in favor of the project.

The developer and like-minded supporters turned out to show that the results of an informal neighborhood board survey — and a formal telephone public opinion poll released to the media the day before the meeting — were no flukes. Many — though not all — pro-Hoopili attendees were sporting carpenter or other construction union T-shirts. Professionally-made signs were distributed. Petitions and sign-in sheets were filled in. Parking validations shared.

The effort of community relations staff, a PR firm and outreach liaisons was coordinated to fight the appearance that Kioni Dudley of Friends of Makakilo had stopped the development in its tracks two years ago and that he’d done so by convincing the LUC that agricultural land shouldn’t be paved over. Though others — state Sen. Clayton Hee and Stuart Scott of the Save Oahu Farmlands Alliance, for example — testified in opposition to the motions Thursday, it was Dudley that had a seat at the table.

Both the anti-Hoopili crowd and Dudley himself were clearly outgunned. He appeared without an attorney while D.R. Horton-Schuler Homes’ Cameron Nekota was flanked by two lawyers. Neither the City and County of Honolulu’s Department of Planning and Permitting nor the State of Hawaii’s Office of Planning objected to the developer’s request to resume the hearing process with the new proposal. The LUC voted 9-0 to let the proposal back on the agenda.

But while it was a clear-cut victory for Hoopili, it was a procedural one. Whether the momentum of the victory carries over to the actual docket — and whether public opinion is really behind the project — is as of yet unclear.

Opponents won’t give up. The Sierra Club recently asked to intervene in the case and could be sitting next to Dudley — and lending its considerable resources and outreach skills to his cause — when the matter comes back on the agenda in the fall.

The developer won’t give up either. Thursday’s turnout for a purely procedural matter, if nothing else, shows that Hoopili isn’t messing around.