OK so pretty much everyone agrees this needs to happen eventually, so what is the big debate about?
Looks like Gavin and other devs are taking the prudent approach and giving some time for us to come to consensus and point out any flaws in the hard fork and possible solutions. He has been doing some careful tests and I support his efforts and ultimately the hard fork but I also recognize there will be some consequences that will need to be addressed ... I.E... Peter Todd correctly pointed out the concern for running Bitcoin over TOR with 20 MB blocks , and others that have very slow internet connections under 2Mbps wont be able to assist with being a full node.
Doesnt bitcoin's decentralization prime? Everyone should be able to run a full node, no?
It doesn't have to be either/or as we still can roll out merkle tree pruning or other solutions to reduce block-chain bloat.