"Andresen's proposal has been received relatively well by the Chinese mining pool operators, who themselves suggested a raise to 8 MB last week. Despite that, however, the proposal seems unlikely to be accepted as part of a unilateral hard fork through Bitcoin XT for now."
Basically, the Chinese miners supports Gavin's 8M limit (and the doubling afterwards) but wants Core to support this. This is fair. I believe most users want to remain with Core because it is opensource and the name is not patented (not the case with bitcoin-xt).
I'd rather like to see QT increasing the max limit to 8MB. That solves all the problem for next 2 years.
Most would like to see that that too. May be this is what Gavin had planned all along. Forcing Core devs to choose the better of the two evils
Yeah, ultimately I think the game played here was something used in court often... I forget the term for it, but basically if you plant an extreme idea "The defendant should be awarded 1 billion dollars", then the jury will think that a 20 million dollar figure is a good compromise, whereas if the 1 billion dollar figure had not been planted, they might have come up with another number. Similar here, the 20 mb size was planted as an extreme, wherein smaller sizes will seem more "palletable" and/or realistic.... due to the magic number status of these figures.