The block time set to 10 minutes is permanent so changing that would be infinitely harder than changing the 1mb cap which has always been a temporary measure from the start.
Change something permanent and you open Pandora's box to future permanent things changing. Then nothing is permanent, and nobody trusts bitcoin anymore, and becomes worthless.
This. I guess people don't think about this in the proper way. There a specifications that should not be tampered with. Changing them would cause problems in regards to trust.
Bitcoin has decent block times. There is no need for very quick transactions as this system is much faster than what the world already has.
Although if we want to see more transactions over the network we have to provide enough room for them.
I feel that there is little difference in changing a block time vs block size.
They are both hard forks, which are essentially a reboot of Bitcoin from that point. The trust is always in the core BTC team doing what they feel is best for Bitcoin and the community in large either agreeing with those changes and continuing to use Bitcoin, or creating their own fork and going from there.
I suppose speculation in this thread doesn't matter though because Gavin and team already made their decision and 20 Mb is coming.