The reality of this debate is that we need to step back and consider the impact of technological change over a period of say 25 years, 50 years, 75 years, 100 years etc.

Consider the early credit cards issued by Diner's Club and American Express in the early 1950s. The data processing technology of the time was tabulating machines and punch cards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabulating_machine This technology was invented in the 1890s and marketed for the most part by IBM.  Does anyone seriously believe that the transaction volumes of Visa and MasterCard today could be supported using 70 year old data processing technology? Limiting Bitcoin's scalability today based on recent technology is equivalent to limiting the total number of credit card transactions to the data processing capabilities of tabulating machines and punch cards in 1945.

Suffice to say I voted in support of Gavin's proposal, but I must add the caveat that it does not go far enough! By the way it was possible to send 1 MB of data over the telegraph network in 1913, if one had the finances of J. P. Morgan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._P._Morgan