I think we should put users first. What do users want? They want low transaction fees and fast confirmations.
This comes down to Bitcoin as a payment network versus Bitcoin as a store of value. I thought it was already determined that there will always be better payment networks that function as alternatives to Bitcoin. A user who cares about the store of value use-case, is going to want the network hash rate to be as high as possible. This is at odds with low transaction fees and fast confirmations.
This!
Bitcoin is about citizen empowerment. When ordinary citizen can't run their own validating nodes anymore you lost that feature (independent from the question of hashing). Then bitcoin is commercialized. The bitcoin devs need to keep that in mind. (If you need to freshen up on your brainwash, here's a great presentation from Rick Falkvinge:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjmuPqkVwWc)