You can't grab power you already have. Gavin was lead developer and shepherded Bitcoin into where it is today. Satoshi himself gave him the reins. it's the other core developers who are grabbing power, but I guess that's how you spin propaganda. Claim the opposition is guilty of the very sin you are committing. That 1 MB limit was a temporary kludge included when bitcoin had NO monetary value and was useful only then. Gavin knew that and has been trying to get rid of it for years. This fee market is just rent-seeking and it will keep Bitcoin a financial backwater if it is left in place.
Gavin had already long stood down as lead maintainer when he pushed his hard fork to the XT repo. Wladimir vander Laan has been chief maintainer since Sept. 2014. Trying to rewrite history is plain deception or just lying. Gavin made some major mistakes (notably BIP 16/17 and BIP 70) in his time but was an adequate caretaker for the tumultuous time Bitcoin went through while he was contributing.
The fee market will develop because the node operators want it to. They will raise the limit when the fees they pay for THEIR OWN transactions naturally incentivises them to want to ... that is the in-built incentive mechanism to stop fees going to infinity as the doom-mongers and catastrophic-cliff screamers will try to scare you with.
This system has been designed very well, the built-in incentive structures will only become apparent as it fully ramps up and comes on-line. We are still in the commissioning phase, just relax and watch if you don't feel like you can understand everything that is happening.