To be accurate, it wasn't "the lead developer" who suggested raising the block size limit, it was me. I am a Bitcoin developer, but Gavin is the lead. So you can blame me if you like.

Along with raising the size limit, I have also been strongly urging people to upgrade to 0.8 for some time now. In fact, I'm the one who originally benchmarked and wrote the code to use LevelDB - the mysterious problems we've had with bdb being one of my motivations (the other was performance).

Ultimately, this problem is an old bug that has already been resolved through a large effort to get us off bdb. It's unfortunate that so many miners have NOT heeded the call to upgrade and we had to learn another one of bdbs inadequacies the hard way, along with rolling back to keep those slow miners online. Every miner will have to upgrade sooner or later, that is just inevitable.

Atlas's post was not prescient or insightful. We knew when we made the switch to LevelDB that it introduced the risk of a hard fork. This is not something that had to be pointed out by a banned forum poster. However - as you can see - there was no alternative. BDB has serious, fundamental problems that cannot be fixed. Upgrading to LevelDB is the solution.