I think there's a middle ground which can grow the blocksize a bit for now if it has to.  And some technical hope that the problem can be solved so that we have decentralisation and more scale.  Sidechains have a security trade off but do give you full (and potentially more) bitcoin ethos functions - eg someone can do zerocash, or network enforced limits etc.  Other things also snarks can do magical things (full node validation and low bandwidth), sharding like Rusty Russel is exploring with pettycoin (its not an alt, its an approach to sharding bitcoin).  Federated pegs.  And Open Transactions offers some interesting protection via its trust but verify approach though maybe not quite full bitcoin features, it can offer many features and maybe some different ones also (eg blinding though that as I understand it hampers audit, and I didnt see a way to repair that either yet).