Exactly. If a solution is not understandable for users with average IT expertise, then it will never be understandable for anyone with even less IT knowledge. And typically owners of large mining farms and exchanges do not have time to do those learning, so they tends to select the solution that they can understand or listen to people they like. This will turn the decision making into politics, and who are good at lobbying and PR will push in their changes. And this is not people would like to see in bitcoin. So, the knowledge gap of different participants decided that you really can't reach a wide consensus upon a radical or complex solution, XT's failure already proved that
Understanding can be of different levels: conceptual, algorithmic, implementational... I bet most people don't quite grasp how Bitcoin's Script stack machine is implemented, though it doesn't prevent them from utilising it, if they know conceptually at least. What's enough for most people is that a particular component has been peer-reviewed thoroughly to prove it's safe to use it.
Indeed, during early days of bitcoin, developers have much more freedom to do whatever they want, partly due to that no one cares about it, and partly due to that there are no major interested stake holders because of its low value
But now situation is different, the network has attracted so much venture capital and investors, these guys all have their own agenda thus the political landscape has changed. A good example is kncminer, they took the crowd funding money, realized their projects and start to drive their own mining operation secretly
At this stage, posting on a forum or reddit or checkin some code in git does not make a lot of sense, because the decision making power is not in the hand of developers, but in the hand of large mining pools, exchanges and payment processors. If devs represent a complex solution which those large players do not understand thoroughly, they would just ignore it (they have to protect their million dollar investment as best as they can). They could just keep running the old client, and build their clearing and settlement channel to avoid the scaling problem altogether
Imagine that when the blocks are full and each transaction cost a lot to clear, then only large service providers would be able to use blockchain to clear with their business partners. Users will find out that using web wallet services will cost just a few cents as usual and clears instantly, but using core client will cost $100 and maybe confirmed after 1 day, so they will definitely move to use blockchain.info or similar web wallet instead
You see, this is also a solution, since the risk on individual service provider is much smaller than the risk of the whole network, it can be accepted. And this solution is much easier for every investor to understand than that Segregated witness complication. In fact, most of the people are still very used to centralized service provider, so they would accept a locally centralized solution easily
The best scenario is that all the large players out there have deep IT expertise and can easily get what those new changes' pros and cons, but in my experience it is not the case. Rich people have totally another set of criteria in decision making