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I'm not suggesting it should be crippled, merely that it can only live within its technological means due to its architecture at that moment in time. The architecture imposes its own limits because of the lack of available resources to perform better, or conversely, the resources available (or lack of) impose the limits onto Bitcoin. This doesn't cripple anything, because over time as the resources available increase (or efficiency increases), Bitcoin is able to take advantage of them.
The same is for any currency, be it Bitcoin, Nxt, and others, they are limited in operation by the efficiency of the resources demanded by the implementation, at that moment in time.
There is no way to work around the resource limits available at any one moment in time in a vertical manner, which is the problem here with these "high TPS currencies", be it bandwidth, processing, storage...you can only be as efficient as the most efficient available resources will allow...past that, you have to start chopping things out and reduce the work load.
I'm sure that VISA didn't have 1 person verifying and doing all those punch card transactions, they had many, so it didn't matter that the resources available to do it were extremely inefficient. Block chains are like that scenario, no matter how many nodes you have everyone of them is verifying the same data as everyone else, which is exactly the same (in terms of performance) as having just one verifying all the data.
Actually in the 1940's and up to the 1970's the primary methods of transactions were cash and other bearer instruments so nobody had to verify any ledger since there was no ledger to verify. It was simply too expensive to have even
one entity doing the verification. With the more widespread availability of mainframe computers in the 1970's data processing costs came down and it became viable to have centralized ledgers so the widespread use of credit cards and in the 1990's debit cards became possible. Now as data processing costs have further come down it is becoming viable to have decentralized ledgers such as Bitcoin, Monero etc.
I really must emphasize that a historical perspective over the last 50 years and going back 200 years or more is critical to properly understand this issue.