Needs to be increased is tricky. The natural and necessary state for blocks is nearly full; defining need is hard.  "Near-universally agreed to be good to increase" would be better, but people are sensibly worried that it would be held back by unreasonable people and so they are unwilling to take that risk.

That sounds like something that would completely undermine the existance of transactions fees-- which are the only long term security arguement we have (what will pay for adequate POW security as the subsidy declines). It would also allow the system to slip into arbritary amounts of centeralization if those increases were really guarenteed... because it could get to a point where no one but a few api providers bothered to run nodes.