Yes, suppose that I'm an average people without enough IT expertise, the only thing I can understand is that 2MB is 100% larger than 1MB, just like my 2 GB hard drive is 100% larger than my 1GB hard drive. From my point of view, if 1MB blocks already worked for 7 years fine without being full, there is almost no reason why 2MB will not work since that is a very small change, given everything else unchanged, it is very easy for me to evaluate the risk involved
However, if someone presented me a complex solution that has never been on live traffic and say this will scale bitcoin similar to 2MB increase, then there are just too much change and too much variables that I have no way to evaluate their risk
Then as you described, I can look for advice from experts and seek the guidance from "Authorities". But you know that most of the bitcoin user come to bitcoin is just because they don't trust any centralized authorities since power always corrupts. Should they trust a group of devs instead of FED? And what if these devs can not reach agreements? The reason people support 2MB is simply not because they trust Gavin or Jeff, they trust nobody, they only trust their own judgement, especially when they had millions of dollars invested
This phenomenon of simple math over complex scheme has always been witnessed at various IT products: People usually prefer a camera with larger pixel count, so the company focus on improving the image quality instead of pixel count all have failed due to lower sale of their products. Foveon sensor for example is the only sensor that can record all the color information at each pixel, but unfortunately most of the consumer only know how to count numbers