Right now, bitcoin doesn't work well. Pseudo-4MB or not. Well, that's more or less what happened: bitcoin is now at 1/3 of the market cap, the forking fear is gone, bitcoin now has two viable clones in the top 20 and as far as I know, bitcoin is still at its 1 MB block limit after the segwitx2 failure, no ?
Nope. Since the Segwit's activation, its theoretical size would be about 2MB (if everyone uses Segwit). The size concept is now based on the transaction weight which doesn't require a hard fork. Isn't the prices affected mostly by the problem with the regulations?
Segwit has advantages, but the trick of only counting half of the real data and claiming it makes a difference is very cheap. A transaction, whether segwit or legacy, takes about the same amount of data, except that you don't count everything in the main block with Segwit. But for storage and transmission, that's the same burden.
In reality, Segwit didn't do zilch to the actual amount of bitcoin transactions per block:
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-per-block?daysAverageString=7No big increase has been seen when segwit got activated end of August 2017.
People don't really use it, even given the high fees:
http://segwit.party/charts/Segwit is good, but for a totally different reason: atomic swaps.
Given the competition of bitcoin cash, and the fact that bitcoin, finally, did fork, rendered the power monopoly of Core moot. When it will have become a moot point, I guess suddenly for core, the holy 1 MB block limit will not be a problem any more, they will invent another narrative.... and it won't matter any more, because they overplayed their hand, split bitcoin over their pet story, and removed bitcoin as the market monopolist. Which is a very good thing. Brand monopoly is a bad thing, and competition improves everyone.
I'm not particularly fond of hard forks for Bitcoin. It's a lot harder to do than a soft fork. Lightning network could help with the issue.
I would say that the fact that the prices of the other coins are so high could be because of Bitcoin's name. Afterall, they do contain "Bitcoin". Would be safe to say that their trading volume is due to miners and those coins being brought over with the fork.
I think that hard forks are good things :they are THE way to have decentralized "governance". Instead of voting and killing of the "smart minority", it acts like biological evolution. The mutant is maybe in minority, but it can fill its ecological niche, and maybe even exterminate the parent species if it is superior. Most mutants die immediately. But some survive, and some may even exterminate the parent. Hard forks are nature's way to improve biology, and they are the free market equivalent as compared to state-planned economies based upon a parliament voting.
In any case, the whole block size debate was full of deception and disinformation, and the hard block limit in bitcoin was/is a bad thing for the strain of bitcoin that contains it. Hence the good OP question. Satoshi made a mistake, or wanted to put a bomb in bitcoin by doing so, or thought it would be no issue to change it. There's absolutely no sense in hard-limiting block size without limiting the system's utility at the same time. If bitcoin is at 1/3 market cap right now, it is because of this block limit (and the very bad way of handling it by Satoshi's heirs).
I would even say that a massive LN on top of a hard-limited block chain is suicide, because of the danger of massive settlement. With flexible blocks, settlements will always be possible. On a block-limited chain, settlements are also restricted, making the "settlement run" instead of a "bank run" a genuine possibility. A well-targetted spamming campaign combined with a settlement panic could be fun to watch.
In summary, no argument holds for hard block limits, and the final argument "my goodness, it is a hard fork" is now done too, because, hey, hard forks happened already.