All that said (and I'm a natural skeptic) I had enough confidence...or something...in Bitcoin to take a decent sized position, a majority of which I hold today. I anticipated subordinate chains as the most tenable scaling mechanism from a very early time in my involvement, and with 'sidechains' that looks to be within grasp. If they can be available and leveraged before those who wish to 'embrace, extend, and extinguish' Bitcoin then there is still hope for the solution.
Sidechains can not be done in a trustless manner without a hard fork of the Bitcoin protocol. Additional opcodes or other mechanisms need to be introduced to allow validating the SPV proof for the sidechain. There is no evidence that there is sufficient support for a hard fork to support sidechain SPV proofs. If the block size is not raised as blocks become fuller, delays become longer, and fees become higher any support for a hard fork to add SPV proofs will evaporate. SPV proof are significantly larger than the average mainchain txn and the potential of multiple sidechains means it would consume valuable blockspace.
So to pin your hopes on sidechains
and keeping the 1MB limit is just silly. Honestly I would love to see a hard fork to add SPV proofs and fix some low level plumbing of the main chain at the same time but it may never happen. It certainly isn't going to happen in a scenario where users are finding it increasingly more difficult and expensive to use bitcoin for their transactions.