This is utter bullshit as over the past week I've seen my mempool easily get down below 1MB of transactions now that the transaction spam has ended on mainnet.
You think it has been low recently, wait until after segwit is active and starting to get used by major transactors.. :-/
That is
THE question though, what will post segwit bitcoin be like.
One side believes segwit will work, the other side believes it will make very little difference.
This is why although I wouldn't pick either of the current solutions, this compromise will at least allow the question to be answered.
If it does work, then the demand for bigger blocks will decline and we will just have segwit. If it fails to make an impact then opinion may swing towards bigger blocks.
Q: What's wrong with "dummy" transactions to make up the difference?
A: Nothing, as long as 2 years from now you're OK with wasting 2-8GB of HDD space just because some idiot decided there should be a "minimum sized block" and you're in favor of being in direct opposition to scaling.
Q: What's wrong with waiting until the mempool supports the new block size minimum?
A: Let's suppose segwit reduces weight count by 30%. That means that it takes 30% more transactions to fill 1MB of space, compared to pre-segwit. That, also, means that when there aren't enough transactions to fill 1 block, that block will take 30% longer to fill and confirm. That further means that there would be 0 transactions left to start the next block and each successive block would take exponentially longer. This all means that, if segwit actually works, there could be times where there are 1 hour block times and 3 hours to confirm 6 blocks could become a regular thing. This is the diametric opposition to scaling.
Maybe I've misunderstood but I thought it was only the very FIRST block that needs to be >1Mb, once that has been done there there is no minimum size, so no bloat or delays.