My advise to you is to start looking at growth in another light. While it seems reasonable to track "adoption & growth" by an increase in the userbase, I have recently come to the conclusion that what might be even more preferable is a growth in capital.
I guess this comes back to our different idea of Bitcoin's value proposition but to put it shortly, my opinion is that more expensive transaction fees on the blockchain will hardly hinder the adoption of capital looking to buy a spot and park their money in the unforgeable ledger. That is because bitcoins are a unique collectible unlike anything the world has seen since gold. Unfortunately much like gold some characteristics limit its direct use as a mean of exchange. Gold's shortcoming is in its physicality, Bitcoin's own is the decentralization tradeoff.
This is just for the record as Peter is doing an admirable job of explaining things, I have highlighted the fundamental failings in your logic which makes you come to the wrong conclusion. I fully expect you to ignore this and hand-wave it away, but here goes...
1. Growth in capital is a reactive process, it is a market response to the growth of the whole ecosystem. There have been altcoins with enormous early capital such as Auroracoin where $100 million in market cap rapidly went to zero, like morning mist in the sun. This was because the capital temporarily existed but there was no ecosystem to maintain it.
2. Bitcoins are not a "unique collectible" because while bitcoins are truly finite, cryptocurrency is infinite. Litecoin is just Bitcoin with a different name and a few minor software changes. Many new coins exist such as Monero and NXT and Etherium. ALL of these could do the job of Bitcoin if Bitcoin vanished. The only thing keeping Bitcoin at No.1 is a positive feedback loop: ecosystem usage (transactions) > utility value -> market price -> mining power -> PoW security of blockchain -> more public interest -> more ecosystem usage
The problem with the 1MB is that it will eventually cripple this all-important feedback loop.
you know what I can't stop thinking that the max block size is a transport layer constraint that have crept in consensus layer.
Now, that is a profound observation.