There is this idea that we must choose between settlement network or payment network, this is a false dichotomy, a false choice. Bitcoin can be both of these things and more, they actually reinforce each other in a synergistic fashion. By attempting to put one above the other you are actually breaking both.
Bitcoin is and can be many different things to different people, there are many coders and engineers who think that we can scale Bitcoin, therefore I think that we should, even if Core thinks that we should not, their reasons for not doing so remains ideological and I have a distinctly different vision for Bitcoin which also happens to align closer to the original vision of its founder as well. I am sure that there are many people that did originally sign up for this original vision and do not appreciate this bait and switch.
I appreciate most of the work done by Core but I do not want a technocratic group of engineers and coders to dictate to us what Bitcoin should become and what its economic policy should be, this should be determined by the market itself instead. I rather have the engineers remind us ideologues of what is possible so that we can then pursue our dreams to create a better world. It is not impossible to increase the blocksize limit, so I reject the notion that we must choose between settlement layer or payment network now.
I think we all want the same thing we deffer only on how to get to that promised land. For some the path is clear, larger blocks. For me and others the path we walk of larger and larger blocks with insufficient fees leads to network collapse.
If the blocks become larger it implies that there is increased adoption and use of Bitcoin. A high volume of low fee transactions over the long run would actually pay out more for the miners compared to a high volume of low fee transactions. The idea that if we increase the blocksize over time as the technology allows as it improves would lead to the network collapsing is not supported by the facts.
If we had a sixty four megabyte blocksize limit for instance with the same fees per transaction payed out today it would already exceed the present block reward. It is not impossible to have blocks this large, in a decade from now it might even seem trivial. It would even take BIP101 eight years to reach this point, and the newly proposed Bitcoin Classic more then twelve years. Most of the other blocksize limit increase proposals are even more conservative then this, which is fine. My point being is that a high volume of low value transactions can pay for the networks security and this would not lead to the network collapsing as you claim, especially as the limit is slowly increased as our technology improves.