Bitcoin is based upon a bogus application of sound money doctrine, but has no value regulation mechanism in it that tries to make bitcoin keep constant economic value (or slightly and predictably increasing or decreasing value). In other words, bitcoin has no deflation/inflation control AT ALL, and has fallen into a speculative deflationary spiral.
Imho it was
designed to be deflationary. Just think: 21M cap from start, the real chance that some money will be lost (pk lost, tx sent to wrong address or simply burned..), this doesn't look like a mistake.
Since Bitcoin was an anti-banking system, I think that it was designed to be deflationary as opposite to the inflationary every day fiat.
Dogecoin was designed to be inflationary and the markets were not happy about that...
Both these aspects make bitcoin into a highly speculative asset that is only good for large transactions where the market can accept huge fees.
The fees were huge because of the spam attacks. This was a mistake caused by Bitcoin development falling a bit behind (imho), although "development" is not the best word here, getting the development live would be more correct.
Normally only the careless faucet-dependent newbies (or similar) get to pay too big fees. You know, tons of small inputs.
Both these aspects make bitcoin into a highly speculative asset
Money attracts speculators, that's caused by it's success, not by the design.
Even poorly designed (or scammy) ICOs attract speculators, so Bitcoin becoming a speculative asset is .. normal and expected.
Edit:
From what I've read here and there bigger blocks open a door for more problems in Bitcoin, that's why core devs tried to avoid it. Maybe smarter people can tell on better words.
Core is saying that because their agenda is to push people off-chain onto their LN. Gavin was right on that one. There is NO technical problem with big blocks, but there is a huge economic problem with it if the block rewards run out.
Did it occur to you that maybe Core has one agenda and Gavin has another?
It makes no difference between them. LN may give Bitcoin the chance to become coffee money. Unlimited is just another dead end.