What isn't being focused upon is the benefits of increasing the privacy with higher transactions. It has already been pointed out that decentralized projects like lighthouse are being harmed by the 1MB limit and this similarly will effect other projects like open bazaar. Additionally, more transactions allow for coinshuffle and coinjoin more opportunity to have more benign transactions to mix with and protect the privacy of the users. I personally cannot wait to start selling all sorts of legal items on open bazaar and performing all sorts of legal transactions with dark wallet as a means to supporting peaceful but questionable (in some peoples eyes) transactions. This is the same reason individuals like Jacob Appelbaum want TOR to go mainstream so that sufficient bandwidth and users can give cover to whistle blowers and journalists.  


Of the active nodes in existence few if any of them would be effected by this hardfork(most users don't even know that they need to contact their ISP and unblock port 8333 which is blocked by default by almost every ISP) so the fears of centralization are exaggerated. What can we do to fight centralization?

1) Make more appliance like mining devices like water heaters /space heaters that use ASIC's to decentralize mining and empower the users
2) Just deploy more nodes that are dual function and allow the user to benefit by supporting the network. I.E.. a 5 dollar VPS to host their site, act as a TOR relay, and bitcoin node
3) Many mesh networks being developed look promising and will help decentralize bitcoin - https://mycelium.com/bitcoincard will function as a mesh network which could be used in conjunction with local nodes from merchants to act as full nodes and uplinks to the internet