It strikes me that Satoshi seemed more sensitive to system footprint than many of those who came after.  Both in design and in configuration he seemed to have left Bitcoin in a condition which was suitable more for a reliable backing and clearing solution than as a competitive replacement for centralized systems such as PayPal.

By this I mean that the latency inherent in the Bitcoin-like family of crypto-currencies are always going to be a sore point for Joe sixpack to use in native and rigorous form for daily purchases.  And the current block size is a lingering artifact of the time period of his involvement (actually a guess on my part without looking through the repository.)

I was disappointed that (now) early development focus was on wallet encryption, prettying up the GUI, and the multi-sig stuff if this came at the expense of merkle-tree pruning work.  I personally decided to make lemonade of lemons to some extent in noting that although I thought the priorities and direction were a bit off, the chosen course would probably balloon the market cap more quickly and I could try to make a buck off it no matter what the end result of Bitcoin might be.