...The only reason Maxwell has been pushing side chains (if you follow the arguments from the beginning) is because they would allow needed features without bastardizing the original design of Bitcoin. If you're going to change something as fundamental to the original design of Bitcoin as block size why don't you just increase the max coins above 21m or lock the mining reward at 50 coins? The only way to change a basic core design feature of Bitcoin is to admit that the design is flawed. If that's the case then design a new coin that's not flawed, implement all of the corrections you want to the new coin and end this failed experiment. To me this argument is no different than PoW vs PoS. You can't fix that midstream. You need to start over.
But the 1MB limit wasn't part of the original design.
Here, Gavin explains:
Back in 2010, after Bitcoin was mentioned on Slashdot for the first time and bitcoin prices started rising, Satoshi rolled out several quick-fix solutions to various denial-of-service attacks. One of those fixes was to drop the maximum block size from infinite to one megabyte (the practical limit before the change was 32 megabytes the maximum size of a message in the p2p protocol). The intent has always been to raise that limit when transaction volume justified larger blocks.
Make all the corrections to a new Bitcoin and use that one. Their are enough potential and known problems with Bitcoin to start over instead of continuing to patch on top of a patch of poorly written original code. If you read the entire article even Gavin said these changes won't be trivial.
If you're going to quote something quote Satoshi saying the blocksize needs to be changed in this way. If I believe Gavin is relaying Satoshi's ideas correctly, then the problem was DDoSing the system. That's impossible with the 7tps rate but will that problem return when the blocksize increases?
Satoshi said it can be phased in at a predefined block number far in the future. By the time we reach that block most people will be running the new clients.