I stand corrected. Many blocks are empty but they are small so they don't add too much to blockchain size growth. Though they do add to sync time, and processing latency (both being amortized over a tiny average number of transactions per block).
Nevertheless the block time should be increased significantly, probably not even to 2 but to something like 4 or 5. That is the only way to avoid an unacceptable orphan rate for a decentralized network, or the alternative (close to what we have now) of extreme centralization as everyone moves to the largest pools.
Bitcoin already has problems with centralization. By design (although in fact the block time was not really a design choice in the usual sense of the word, it was just one of the cut-and-paste tweaks that TFT did when he cloned BCN) XMR is far worse than bitcoin.
Also 2x the bitcoin bandwidth will not work. If transactions are roughly 10x as large (ring sigs plus breaking up by amount), that gives 1/5 the transaction rate. And bitcoin still needs to scale a lot to get a large scale use. This page envisions block sizes of half a gigabyte or more: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability