the criticism here is that miners with access to huge bandwidth will mine huge blocks and disadvantage the smaller miners because these can't dl the block fast enough to restart mining. You need the newest block in order to mine. The fear is that this would result in greater centralization.
There is a very simple solution to that, and Gavin addressed it here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1503099 Nobody wants to talk about that, though.
The people who want to keep the transaction rate limited never acknowledge the straightforward solutions to the supposed problems that would result from increasing the limit. They talk about scalability as if there are not known solutions to the problem, and certainly don't offer to help implement those
improvements. If the real issue here is home users being able to be equal participants in the network, then why is no one else offering to help
crowd fund the development work needed to make that happen so that we can have both high transaction rates and decentralization?
To facilitate scaling, I prefer to let the free market develop usability methods on a second tier. I think that this will be less risky, more robust, and will provide much better solutions faster for end-users.
My feeling is that some of the core developers are to prone to write off coordinated state level attacks as wacko conspiracy theories. For my part, I don't find such attacks at all improbable.
I would only feel comfortable in a solution where the messaging load is capable of being cloaked using steganographic methods. This means that even consumer grade bandwidth needs to be knocked down by a significant factor.
Is it just a coincidence that some of opponents to transaction rate scalability are also involved with other cryptocurrencies or alternate transaction processing networks whose business case is less certain if Bitcoin is allowed to scale?
Not coincidental at all. This is a big fork in the road which will have a major impact on the end-point of the Bitcoin solution.
Why to people need to frame the necessary changes in pejorative terms like "hard fork", when they could just as easily use the neutral term, "mandatory upgrade". We've already had a few mandatory upgrades that only affected miners. This one is different because it also requires full nodes to upgrade as well, but that need was already anticipated. Blocks have a version number for a reason, and all bitcoind/bitcoin-qt clients have the capability to receive notifications from the developers for urgent messages such as a mandatory upgrade. Why is the debate about whether or not we should ever have version 3 blocks at all instead of which features should go in and how to best make the transition? Why are some developers on record participating in a conversation affirming how the block limit would be raised in the future, but today insist the limit was intentionally permanent from the beginning? If the arguments in favour of leaving the limit in place are so strong, why do they need to lie about the past?
I don't think that propaganda or careful choice of words is the key to success on anyone's part.
Most participants and probably not being deliberately dishonest. There are legitimate concerns on all sides, and everyone is coming at things from a somewhat different perception based on their backgrounds and so on.
Edit: syntax. Then spell check fix associated with the term 'steganography'.