A node in every town is risky because it is easy to take down. Who is going to administer such nodes?
The idea is that the max block size is going to increase, but slowly. Maybe a x10 multiplication of the soft and hard block sizes could be a good start (maybe even risky).
At the same time, to be on the safe side, it is good to develop safe and cheap distributed tecniques to handle micro transactions in order to avoid the unnecessary inflation of the block chain. Like the one I posted and that invite you to read.
It is not an unnecessary complication. Other crypto currencies may arise that handle things better because are better designed and more sofisticated/complicated.
Best regards,
ilpirata79
Sharding the operation of a full node amongst mutually trusting participants seems like an easy enough way to scale. It's not the ideal, and there appear to be more clever ways, but its certainly better than any centralized outcome, if that actually turns out to be the only alternative. So I don't really believe centralization of fully verifying nodes is a realistic long-term fear, except in the case of ridiculously high loads and very unreasonable expectations of the blockchain.
Otherwise I agree, and expect this is pretty much how things will play out: keep kicking the block size limit can down the road until the problem solves itself (it just doesn't need to be raised any more), and build micropayment channel networks for microtransactions, where the point that micro becomes macro is defined by reality, and not what we wish it to be (not that we can't push the envelope with clever scaling solutions).