Forking on a whim, so some VCs who bought $1000 BTCs are that much closer to realizing their dream of everyone using BTC at Coke machines and Starbucks, harms the store-of-value function by diluting the previously more scare and extremely valuable commodity of blockchain real estate.
I feel this brings us to the crux of the matter. Ultimately, the anti-fork argument boils down to "Bitcoin works for us, and does what we want it to, so we should burn the bridge behind us and protect our interests. Let's stop here".
The pro-fork argument says "actually, we're not done yet, let's get some more people (directly) involved with this and see what further innovations we can come up with. We see a bright future ahead and it will be a change for the better".
Personally, I feel the odds much greater that I could make more money off my stash if the gavincoin side wins and I got some timings right (and I seem to have a knack for that.) I've made enough off Bitcoin in straight up monetary gains that now I feel it appropriate try to put in the good fight toward having it be the foundation for something useful to humanity.
You gavincoin people simply won't do the math. There is no realistic point where a decent fraction of the worlds population can use native Bitcoin and have it remain supportable by anything but the most well situated mega-players.
You people remind me of someone who would put a gallon of gas into their tank and drive off into the desert toward a location 1000 miles away. You just cannot get there. You'll die. 'free markets' are not going to magically conjure up gas stations as needed for you. Really, what passes for your thought processes here seem just that stupid, and then some. Really! Else you want Bitcoin to fail for one of several reasons.
And the best part is, you get to choose. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the fork has enough momentum behind it to go ahead. And when it does, you can stay behind on the old chain and stagnate in a niche with your precious limits, or you can stay with the clear majority and see where things go from here when enough people are on board to really challenge the widely accepted perceptions about how money should work.
If sidechains do eventually come to fruition then it's a win-win either way, but until then, the rest of us don't want to risk the network grinding to a halt because too many people wanted to try out Bitcoin and we hit a wall on some inane limit. The future potential for sidechains is not a substantial reason to delay this necessary update. The simple fact is, you can't promise sidechains will be ready in time before we start piling up unconfirmed transactions.
The whole 1MB 'crisis' has been under discussion for at least three years. I don't sense a huge change in sentiment one way or another. A decent percentage of people recognize the futility of simplistic scaling. Perhaps even more now. Various 'world saving' things like micro-channel payments pop up, but eventually it dawns on people that they solve at best weird little corner-case problems. Various Rube Goldberg econo-babble things are proposed and inevitably go nowhere. (I'd be happy to see one in practice, BTW.)
The reason to NOT do a simplistic block size scale without first having a reasonably workable target solution (and sidechains appears the strongest at this point) is because even at 1MB there are still some questions about how defensible that is under certain kinds of attack. How people could watch Obama and Cameron agreeing that nobody should have private info on their own fucking cell phones while at the same time taking it as a certainty that we will always be able to exchange whatever info we want at will even if it threatens corp/gov systems is baffling to me. It's pure hopium and very short-sighted.
As for the unconfirmed transactions, they'll time out. If it stresses some nodes, good for the owners to know it now. It would be the kind of shock which is good for Bitcoin to have now and then. If Bitcoin only functions based on it's ability to stay ahead of the demand, that's pretty week and lame.