One minute blocks that are of size ~1 KB (most of the blocks right now) double the likelihood of a miner getting a block. Selfish mining only becomes a severe issue when blocksize becomes large.
You're the one who is concerned about the reward being too small in 10-20 years??!!
Obviously the goal is to create a design that is sound for the long term, not focus on a couple of weeks of easy mining when there are hardly any transactions on the network. As was pointed out before, solo mining for small (one computer) miners will sooner or later (most likely sooner) become non-viable whether blocks are one minute or two minute blocks. Maybe not in the first week, but if the coin thrives, it won't be long at all. This was a very short-sighted reason to speed up the blocks.
I'm not referring to selfish mining in any case, just regular (random) orphans. If it takes 3 seconds to propagate a block across the network, then with 60 second blocks you will have about 5% random orphans (where two different people solve a block at the same time; only one will survive). This gets much worse when the blocks get bigger (take longer to verify and forward at each hop). If it takes 10 seconds to propagate you are looking at 16% orphans.
Pools reduce orphans by concentrating hash rate and directly communicating with the hashers in a star pattern instead of a p2p. You won't be solving a block at the same time as one of your pool-mates very often (due to longpoll/stratum) and the pool will solve on top of its own blocks more quickly than any foreign blocks, so it will win more races. These effects combine to give pools a huge economy of scale.
Even with those 1k blocks you describe, there are already plenty of orphans, just look at the daemon output. Bytecoin with 2 minute blocks still has a lot of orphans too.
Satoshi was no idiot when he picked 10 minutes, and didn't just pull that number out of his ass. That may be slight overkill but 1 minute is going way too far in the other direction.
I don't know what to tell you smooth. Yes, the situation is not ideal, but tonight we're at 315k on the network.
The miners are speaking. There will be no merged mining of this chain. We can deal with the adjusting subsidy at a later time via hardfork if necessary. For now, the distribution is properly specified and everyone can make their choice appropriately. One minute blocks yield high orphan rates, but we can later integrate GHOST if problems surrounding centralization arise. It's not the end of the world.
I'm sorry you've lost faith in the coin, but I was around for Litecoin and while there were many things I would have done different with that fork, once established it's difficult to sway the majority. I suspect this will be the case for other CN forks, and it'll just end up an eventual shitcoin frenzy with Monero (and ByteCoin) at the top.
