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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. ...
Huh? None of the handful of consumer-land ISP's I've had since 2011 blocked incoming high ports by default. Sounds to me like you are confused about the difference between 'contacting your ISP' and 'logging in to your router'. Or you signed up for some kind of nanny-help-me add-on from your ISP.
Of course many ISPs block out outgoing 8333 by default . Why do you think we see all these threads where people complain that they are getting only 8 incoming connections on their bitcoin QT wallet?
If and ISP blocked a particular port, one would get zero connections on it.
It would not surprise me at all to have a max cons set by and ISP. That would explain the why one has difficulty. Each connection uses network resources in a router (yours and your ISP's respectively.)
This is what drives me nuts about ignorant people making simplistic calculations of capability based on the download speeds (which are artifacts of a marketing department usually anyway.) Ya, you might be able to get some decent percentage of a pipe in use but only by using multiple streams, and that is particularly the case with TCP on a wan. Anyone who has tried to SCP a large file can tell you this. Nobody is going to be thrilled about Joe Sixpack using a thousand sockets, and crappy consumer grade routers will have difficulty. Probably max-cons is set by the ISP to throttle those trying to do torrents. Same trick here. This certainly illustrates the point I'm making about being at the mercy of network infrastructure providers.
IIRC it's even less than that by now. Anyway, I don't have to guess about why this is. It's obviously because for some bizarre reason Satoshi didn't choose to reward transfer nodes in his implementation. Why I have no idea. It's one of the strongest observations supporting the hypothesis that Bitcoin was designed to fail (or at least become centralized and under control.) Not that I believe this to be true, but it is one of the many hypothesis that I continue to hold open. Probably he just ran out of time and patience. If he was ignornant enough to not forsee the difficulties with the block size hard-fork then he may also have imagined that transfer node rewards were something that could be tacked on later.