How is it so important? For whom? We have no evidence reaching the blocklimit would even result in any problems.
If you are a business or a payment processor who depends upon securing your transactions and having certain procedures where you depend upon an average Poisson distribution of 5-20 minutes being the most likely time to expect a confirmation and all of a sudden certain spikes in transaction volumes delay those confirmations to over an hour or longer than both you and your customer will be negatively effected. Lack of Transaction availability can also spur a new economy of volatile transaction fees which grow and shrink dynamically in a relationship to scarcity. Not knowing the transaction fee at any given moment is not a good thing either(its bad enough we have to deal with volatility in the price of the asset alone)
Additionally, what isn't being focused upon is the need to have a certain percentage of transactions on the block-chain as a possible means of gradually supplanting block rewards as the primary solution for securing the network to transaction fees securing the network.
yes, bitcoin is slow. That's nothing new. Litecoin is faster.
Look at primecoin. Another fast chain people can use. Your argument is invalid.
This whole missle-crisis hardfork circus just alienates people. Gavincoin hardfork will just make sure it dies faster. Bitcoin people have grown so arrogant. You think it's a guarantee you'll be dominating all of payment with this coin - that's your arrogant basic assumption and it's wrong. Darling, nothing is guaranteed.
Bitcoin in fact has a lot of problems and many alts right now have better fundamentals than Bitcoin has. Bitcoin should focus on preserving its marketcap - but it fails with that task already. I don't see a need for it to scale because it looks like it is kind of abandoned right now by its formal userbase.