Sorry, I may be a bit noob here, but wasn't it urgent in 2017? I recall that transaction fees skyrocketed... Seems to me that it could've used with a few more MB then. What would've been the big deal to have sort of an soft cap/hard cap sort of thing? Surely 1mb is unreasonably small?
it's a complex issue, really. bigger blocks increase bandwidth requirements for nodes, encouraging node operators to shut down. more importantly, bigger blocks increase block propagation times among miners. this encourages increased orphaning, which disproportionately affects smaller miners and thus encourages mining centralization (because miners can sidestep network latency limitations that way). here's some good discussion about the issue:
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/42126/do-larger-blocks-make-it-harder-for-smaller-miners-to-compete-why/42148#42148it's also not just about technological limitations. in order for bitcoin to have a limited supply, it was designed such that miner fee revenue would replace the initial mining subsidy we currently have. the block size limit (by encouraging full blocks) is the only way to keep fees from approaching zero. if everyone can send unlimited transactions for next to nothing, there's no incentive for miners to secure the network.
By my calculations, 1 year of full 1mb blocks would be 52.5gb of chain growth. At that rate, it would take ~20 years to fill up my 1 TB SSD... that's nuts! I also live in an area with good internet and I can download at 100mbps, so it would only take me a few minutes to download it.
storage really isn't the primary bottleneck. network latency is the biggest problem, followed by upload bandwidth limitations.
although it's good to keep in mind: we don't want to engineer for the best case scenario with plans to max out average or above-average hardware. by and large, people will not buy dedicated hardware just to run a bitcoin node. most people are only willing to dedicate a portion of their resources (storage space/CPU/upload bandwidth) to bitcoin. if running it starts eating too many resources, they'll just shut it down.