Can someone explain to me how not raising the block size limit is a good thing? All transactions should be able to go thru in a semi-timely manner and if the limit is reached in a block then that transaction is just cancelled? That doesnt' make sense to me, I don't see a good reason NOT to switch to bitcoin XT. Secondly, why wasn't this thought of originally in the making of bitcoin? Seems odd.
From the beginning the block size limit works as a spam filter (even this year it successfully resisted the spam attack by coinwallet.eu during July and September). And now people realized it also can work as a means to prevent centralization (As long as blocks are small, average people with a little bit IT knowledge can run a full node in his home thus increase the level of decentralization)
This has nothing to do with transaction capacity, but a live or death question. If the blocks are huge and average people can not run a node, thus they all run on large data centers, then a couple of phone call to ISP could disable the bitcoin network. By making blocks small and portable, you can run it on almost any device thus it becomes unlikely you can disable bitcoin network unless you shutdown the whole internet
Mining nodes on the other hand can not be run by average home users, Satoshi also anticipated certain degree of mining centralization. This is also a potential risk but not a live and death problem
So, as long as average home users can run a full node, the block size is not the problem. But simulation by bitfury already indicated that we will have a severe performance problem with 4MB blocks on average home computer, so currently the only safe choice is 2MB, not 8MB promoted by XT