I can't see a future with less than a thousand or so nodes.
I don't buy the "centralization" fears related to increased blocksize.
Because you don't factor in the government's ease of regulating 1000 permanently sited nodes compared to zillions of ephemeral nodes in a truly decentralized system.
Imagine that every major research university runs a full node. If you were this "scary, monolithic government" that you seem to fear, how would you go about controlling the software that scientists are running in their cryptocurrency labs? I'm sure you could introduce several rouge nodes, but that wouldn't matter. You have to control them all. And then you need to control the nodes of the bitcoin companies, power users, and government agencies across the world. How are you going to do it, Anonymint?
Secondly, the ~1000 node scenario is not what I suspect will play out; it's just that even if that scenario does play out, the network could still be more decentralized than it is now.