Mircea and his #BTC-assets brigade has already declared 20mb blocks to be an attack on Bitcoin, so some degree of fireworks/popcorn/tears/LULZ/drama are guaranteed.
Forcing txn fees higher to contain the blockchain bloat would also implode the BTC price because you will destroy the ideological propaganda that caused people to predict much higher BTC prices due to network effects.
You would essentially be relegating Bitcoin to a hobbiest experiment on the virtues of small currencies used by a fraction of the population with that population sparsely distributed over the globe.
This is correct. Can't believe people can't see this. Or maybe they do but don't care.
The only thing which causes people to infer rising BTC prices in the future is a rising BTC price in the present. 99.99999% of people don't give even a whiff of a fart of a tiny little shit about the "network effect" even assuming they've heard of it (which they haven't).
Until the UXTO set is able to be pruned and/or otherwise optimized for (sub)linear growth, your starry-eyed fantasies about billions of direct, Metcalfe-empowering BTC users are dead.
Fortunately, the network effect still works when billions of people indirectly use BTC via altcoins, sidechains, and institutions kept honest by realtime auditing.
Nobody (except possibly Gavin-the-clod) is powerful enough to "relegate Bitcoin to a hobbiest experiment." That ship has sailed; that horse is out the barn, that toothpaste is out the tube; that goose is cooked. The Bitcoin cat is out of the bag, and heaven help anyone who tries to put her back in it.
Your disturbing lack of faith in Bitcoin's antifragility, Gresham's Law, marginalism, and the invisible hand are noted.