Justus laid out a structure. There are a great number of missing pieces between what exists today in the consensus code and that structure. There are also undefined and missing elements in the ecosystem. I like the structure too, but we aren't anywhere close to it yet and it won't be soon.
The current proposal is Gavin's most reasonable one yet. He dropped the assumptions about the future, took out most of the guesswork, and is implementing the method satoshi offered when the antispam 1mb limit was created in 0.3 or so.
More would be great, and future proof would be even better, no limit best.... but... remember, we are still in beta. The pieces to do any of that are not written, tested, integrated, accepted and secured.
Bitcoin is still a baby. So as eager as we all are to get there, we will get there by baby steps or end up not getting at all. There are a great many looking for us to fail (check the short interest lately?) we help that failure by over-extending what can be done.
20mb gives us some room to build more of the missing pieces. Its enough for now.
I can't have said it better, really.
I'm aware that bitcoin development is quite peculiar and there's little to no margin for errors.
And this is the reason why I think it's important to start spreading Justus's idea in advance,
because as you rightly said we need a lot of time to get there. So the sooner we start the better.
That said I wonder what are the link you see between the price discovering mechanism sketched by Justus
and the Bitcoin consensus code? I see them as quite unrelated pieces of the system, but maybe I am missing
something obvious.