Some of my view:

Fast online payment is just an additional feature for bitcoin, not core value, and it will never be. People comes to bitcoin because of it's value (generated from its unique properties), not because it is 2% cheaper than CC (with CC consumer have the advantage of performing a charge back if the seller is a scammer), people will spend fiat instead of bitcoin since they know the value of fiat is going down constantly and btc price will rise in long term, if bitcoin's value holds, they even can get a fiat loan backed by bitcoin and spend

If we really reached the status that many transaction can not be done quickly, then satoshi's idea about "phase in the change" is a good implementation approach, and it may require several intermediate versions, the process should take at least one year. But the core question now is wether we really need such a change

Actually many people here are just hoarding coins, there are not really a lot of transactions happening everyday, especially miners who connected to a pool. If we remove satoshi-dice, I think at least in the latest 2 years it will still work fine. Satoshi-dice is just an execellent example of no matter how big the block size is, there will be applications flood that space with meaningless transactions

A fork means the amount of coin will get doubled immediately, a 100% inflation in the whole system, and this directly destroyed the promise of there will never be more than 21 million coin. If this happens once, it will happen again, then bitcoin is not in any way better than fiat today, just the inflation control has been shifted from FED to a couple of programmers, people won't have incentive to hold their coins, they will sell before these programmers come up with a new idea to improve bitcoin and inflate the system again with new coins

Bitcoin is not only some software code, it is a spirit, if it split itself into two personality, then it essentially lost the soul