No one other than cultist bitcoiners will ever download the entire Blockchain. Hell, even I won't ever do it again. I lost my copy of the entire chain a little over a year ago, waited two days for it to never catch up and quit. I'm an SPV kind of guy forever after that. Pruning mode in the new clients is a joke and if you want to revert to a full node you need to redownload the whole thing again.
What are you going to do about laptop people? Over half of the people I know only own a laptop, believing it stupid to have both a desktop and a laptop when the laptop does everything they want to do. Most, if not all, of these "laptopers" have less than a 500gb SSD drive. Which would you prefer to do? Make them rearrange their lives to accommodate bitcoin by purchasing a dedicated bitcoin desktop or make Bitcoin the only thing on their laptop and run only a client with the prune=<500> switch set? Both options are not only ridiculous but will not happen because no one will do it when they can just use ApplePay or a debit card instead.
Really big blocks - when is that happening again?
Not that I argue with your logic, downloading the blockchain is a painful process for many people and they will use SPV clients. However, Bitcoin is primarily used precisely because people can't use ApplePay or a credit/debit card. Not always because they need to buy something illegal with Bitcoins. Many use cases are areas like gambling that can't be funded with a credit card but these areas are only illegal in the eye of police states. These people are willing to take some pain to learn Bitcoin and download the blockchain. But yeah, given that Bitcoin is a pilot project of cryptocurrency and competition tirelessly working on more manageable and flexible alternative designs, the current status quo of Bitcoin is not going to be forever.