We have sidechains/drivechains/Alpha Elements, where new concepts can be tested. I wouldn't expect something being "the right thing" from the very beginning, but the more development we have, the better it secures bitcoin future. And everything which looks at things that are more than low-level increase of blocksize or amount of coins should benefit future work.
There are many people worried about miner centralization(three countries: Canada, Island and China...), unhappy situation with ASIC miners and BCH support, and possibly growing size of blockchain... And then we learned, hard forkes are probably a "no-go". Further development is necessary.
So if UASF inspired hardforks are a no-go for MR POWA (wow, what a combination of buzz words!) is not visible, we should encourage ongoing research from many areas, and not only Altcoins, also sidechains can be used.
I want to see commodity SHA-256 ASICs sold cheaper than GPUs, and as readily available. I think thats probably the best solution, long-term. Too bad I am not a hardware guy.
Yes, in principle I agree. Economies of scale in the manufacturing environments have shown centralization. So even if we find new ASICs with independency from the evil ASIC provider of today, I would guess, that after finding a new cheap SHA256 ASIC cheaper as GPUs, we'd do the race again and find centralization of manufacturer of these new devices, and maybe they implement then a hidden function to flood the blockchain with invalid blocks, bringing new attack vectors to light... Decentralization (to keep independency) is a very, very hard topic. Economically and especially at sociological level...