We don't even need to consider whether Gavin has been compromised. He knows there is $billions of VC money depending on Bitcoin growth and he has an implicit fiduciary obligation to make sure Bitcoin scales. Decentralization was already a lost cause any way (gmaxell's delusions about CoinJoin being viable and other tech notwithstanding), so any realistic would realize that you might as well maximize the financial impact of Bitcoin in the mainstream.

The ideological aspects were lost the day v0.1 was released. We don't need to blame Gavin for what even Satoshi admitted he set in stone back on v0.1.

Disclosure: I don't think even if Bitcoin withered on the vine due to defeat of block size increase, that would stop the NWO outcome. Thus that path doesn't aid me at all, because such a non-anonymous store-of-value with such limited security (image the hashrate if you pull the plug on VC future) would not be a place I would store my wealth (not that I have any at the moment). I'd much rather see Bitcoin grow so we can use it as a reserve currency of altcoins.