3) At 140 TPS Bitcoin is still just a corner-case monetary network. It is woefully short of being some sort of global exchange currency. Bumping up to this rate will simply make the solution less defensible for no particular gain.
140TPS is simply the first step to allow Bitcoin to scale.
I think this is the crux if the disagreement.
It certainly calls to attention the feeling that the gavincoin fork is the proverbail 'camel's nose in the tent' and most of the adherents have no intention of stopping there. As I said, stopping there would be pointless.
The end-game is a vastly larger block size so it is not the slightest bit irrational to consider the choice as being between a lite-weight and defensible (and hopefully decentralized) system and one which is very far from this.
One side wants Bitcoin to scale. Meanwhile, the other side is saying:
Wait; it does not scale well. Making the block-chain larger will just make it that much harder to hide if governments really crack down.
They have a point: using garlic or onion routing at least triples your bandwidth usage. For small miners running full nodes, their Internet costs will likely exceed their power costs.
Several years ago on a thread in the tech section as I recall, some people were musing about the 1MB constrained transaction rate and realized that it happened to be about the maximum that one could expect to run through tor.
I'm not saying that Satoshi considered this when he set the limit...I don't know the guy and don't claim to be able to read his mind (as do many gavincoin enthusiasts) but he did seem to be generally aware of some of these kinds of things. 1MB is also a nice round number so it could have been just an accident of fate. Hard to know at this point, but it does illustrate the points that a few of us are trying to make with respect to the increased defensibility which comes along with a lower level transaction rate.