I was quite disappointed to read that Satoshi envisioned huge centralised farms and users just being users paying fees. That means the end game is a cartel of infrastructure rich companies - back to square one for the proles.
Thats a misrepresentation in any case.
That response was to specific questions about the system being able to work at all. My understanding of it at the time was simply what it said at face value. Proof the system can work, the users get to choose the trade-offs; which is something classical centeralized systems couldn't offer. ::shrugs:: Keep in mind that anything written in 2009-2011 was written in a very different world, not one where people just take for granted that Bitcoin works _at all_.
It's sad that people feel the need to put words in other people's mouths in any case. The whole appeal to authority hugely undermines the principles of the system. If you want something that lives and dies on the whim of some authority: centeralized systems can have much better performance and security properties.
The node incentives thing doesn't seem technically feasable. Or rather, the system had that built in but it was undermined by pooled mining. We now know how to avoid any _need_ to run pooled mining now, but it's always less costly to do so (due to the costs of running a node).
SPV could work in a way that more or less obviates the need for almost anyone to run a node at all; but the existing software never implemented that-- and those working on SPV right now are okay with fairly centeralized trust models and so they seem to not care. (Or even view the low security as a virtue).