You are right, with current settings about consensus, SegWit has (unfortunately?) no chance to come to life.
I feel like the devs should have somehow enforced this (with the risk of ETH fiasco, I know).

You talk about blocksize increase and you are right. Maybe they do. There are quite a couple of options they have and I hope that they will implement the best one, even if it may take some time.
Yesterday I had to make a payment where the time factor was important and.. uh oh, the tx fee was nearly 3$ (!). I didn't like that and I understand now much better why people want something to be done fast.

I still have the feeling that somebody spams the network deliberately...