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?
Are you really serious asking that?
Did you not read the upthread discussion about how the universities are captured.
How else do you think they foisted the lie of Man Made Global Temperature Change on us?
Because scientists are not Truther-idiots and do not believe that changing the composition of the atmosphere does
lead to a change of the climate. One has to be an ideologue or an idiot to spread such formulas.