You're leaving out permanent off chain solutions. You might have seen the alt markets lately... This is not a space without competitive pressure, open source code vs periodic table.
I think your final point is true, the questions are when, and at what cost?
Block reward is the manna to consume while eating everyone else's lunch with unmatched utility. More capacity, more fees, and the inflation curve is ridden with ease.
I'm not against secondary layers, nor structural changes with demonstrated utility, they will be absolutely mandatory for massive scale. However, they build on Bitcoin, sacrifices shouldn't be made to do it the other way around.
@JJG, don't be like BJA, it's not a crisis where everything explodes and fails all at once... it's a slow bleed away of utility and potential.
Than the solution to this dilemma is to do more testing , grow our market share with users, write more software, startup more businesses faster than the other alts. Its still too early to know how to solve our problems or what a fee market event will look like... the only thing we can do is innovate and create redundancy plans.... This does mean we should try and strengthen other implementations(I don't know If I can ever agree on a low threshold for a HF though )
I understand , the above is easier said than done.