what's interesting is that we've never seen it done to the degree it is now. we had the Mystery Miner a few years ago but he stopped it pretty quick. also, despite many upgrades added to the protocol previously, we've never had a fork as a result of SPV mining before either. what's different this time is the consistently full blocks and the fact that Wang Chun told us they create SPV blocks in response to large blocks as a defense. it seems they consider full blocks large blocks so the excessive SPV mining created last nights fork in light of BIP66 and the upgrade to 0.10.x. so in that sense, the 1MB cap is the direct cause of what is happening.
I'm trying to understand your thinking on this matter. It makes perfect sense to me that we'd see an increase in empty blocks as the average block size rises. It seems you think the frequency of empty blocks would also actually decrease if we raised the limit (assuming the rate of transactions stayed the same). Is this an accurate assessment of what you're saying? Can you explain again why you think that?