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We're not in violent disagreement here. Although, I don't think miners moving to software with a 2-4MB max makes this inevitable or even likely. My greater concern is that a company, with the involvement of none other than Eric Schmidt, is steering and molding our current (potentially former) first mover advantage to their own ends. I think a diversified array of software choices hardens Bitcoin even further from outside control. Hiring a majority of the devs of the inertia driven "reference" client has proven much cheaper than a 51% attack, highlighting a fragile facet of our antifragile currency.
Schmidt taking a share of Blockstream doesn't surprise or bother me that much. I'm sure he has some hope of guiding the company's trajectory, or at least keeping informed on it, but I'm also fairly confident that the important players (esp, Back, Maxwell and Wuille) are well aware of and wary of this, and I think it probable that they would bail if it became a problem. In the mean time, the work made possible by the availability of resources is open-source to a reasonable degree and if they split what (if any) is not open would probably go along with them.
My confidence in Back-n-co is not infinite, but they are by far the best bet as far as I'm concerned. I feel this way because of their documented history and the quality of their work. It would have been really interesting to know how Finney would have felt or acted wrt to Blockstream. I do have points of dispute with at least Back and Maxwell but they are minor and I feel that the overall objective for Bitcoin is similar to what I would like to see happen.
I might add that I don't care much about the 'client' (reference or not.) It's the protocol which is key as far as I'm concerned. Ya, having some control over 'the reference client' at this point in Bitcoin's evolution does probably translate into having some significant input into what is practical to do at the protocol level, but it is not a significant concern to me. To me it's just kind of an organic reality and less risky than the alternate. I didn't feel that way earlier in Bitcoin's evolution, and I probably won't feel that way half a decade from now (if Bitcoin is still around) but that's my stance at this point.
I'll preface by saying that the Blockstream guys are highly competent coders and cryptographers, they were before they formed Blockstream, and they are today. Your placement of trust in them thus far is not alien to me. However, a conflict of interest is an insidious thing, it may start out benign, but under the pressure of investors, deadlines, and runway... may begin to allow a form of self delusion... a self reinforcing mentality that what is best for the company is best for the protocol.
The investors that deposited $21 mil didn't do so out of charity, they were sold an eventual ROI. I'm not satisfied with the thesis that it was "we're going to altruistically contribute open source code to better Bitcoin, which will probably make us massive amounts of money somehow, and we'll dissolve the company while stiffing the investors if we have second thoughts about it." I want to know how they plan to make money, and if artificially crippling the main chain could incubate that plan.
It seems that more distribution of available software is the only way to allow miners, who issue the votes that count, to fully exercise their built in right of voting with hashes. If the miners continue to choose core's direction, so be it, I'll convert my node to a segwit node so it actually continues to fully verify. I got interested in Bitcoin because it felt like there wasn't a central point of control, that it natively resisted control by centralized influence. I have confidence that the market will settle the blocksize just as efficiently as it sets the price and the difficulty, a market with production quotas is not a market. Mining valid blocks is not a trivial thing, and those doing it have an interest in seeing the system they manage be as successful as possible.