Up until now I have always had complete faith in Bitcoin, even with all of the hacks and bad publicity, and the massive year and a half long price decline. Now I am not so sure. The block size problem seams as though it may be the last straw. I just don't see how Bitcoin can survive intact after this, no matter which way it goes. There are too many egos, and ulterior motives involved for a strong Bitcoin to emerge on the other side.
Doesn't matter.
If anyone stands in the way of honey badger, honey badger just eats through their torso and out the other side. In other words, if it became clear to the larger community of investors, infrastructure owners, and luminaries that some of the devs were obstructing changes for political or other irrelevant reasons, someone in the community - maybe Gavin, maybe anyone - will create a fork with the required changes and after deliberation and testing the vast majority would adopt it.
Personalities cannot stop Bitcoin. If they try, they just get left behind coding for a worthless fork. Investors are who is
in control.
Or look at it this way, in what other system in the world do people debate so carefully and thoroughly, so far in advance, about such relatively minor changes that hypothetically
might cause a temporary issue? The answer is, only in the most important, civilization-wide mission-critical systems. This should tell you how big of a thing Bitcoin is. This level of debate shows the world we're very serious and are thinking through every nook and cranny of possibility to ensure that this baby grows up to take on the world.
Don't confuse vigorous debate, posturing, and alarmism for gridlock. These things are inevitable because of how much money is on the line. Gavin already agreed to a smaller increase like Peter Todd wanted and to Jeff Garzik's proposal. Consensus is not far away, and a little nudge from full blocks and some pain of backlog will be all that is needed to push through a modest increase, after which the precedent will have been set against the radical "1MB forever" people, so that will be out of the way, and also we'll have better data to argue from. For example, if the new block space soon fills up with spam, we'll know we need to optimize via fees instead next time, and if node count doesn't go down much and large miners don't trample smaller miners then the centralization argument sputters out.