Which, if I am not mistaken, essentially boils down to 'Satoshi always had a 1MB limit - it was in his head from the start, so it was operative from the start. Just trust me on this'.
I ain't buying it. Insufficient evidence presented to support such a conclusion.
Youre mistaken. You failed to quote the upthread discussion I linked to from my prior post, in which I had explained that there was a defacto blocksize (i.e. a defacto Schelling point) limit coded in the default client software that most pools were using. I believe Luke Jr. (a pool operator and Bitcoin dev) may have been the main dissenter, as AFAIK he has always been advocating extremely small blocks (apparently originally even much smaller than 1 MB).
Satoshi only had to become explicit about the 1MB when the feuding about it reached a crescendo. And then Satoshi conveniently ignored pleas to raise the 1 MB before he conveniently suddenly disappeared when those pleas started to reach a crescendo again.
IOW, Bitcoins block size was essentially implicitly centralized during the early years.Although I'm sure this point will result in another interminable time sink of a sidebar. If it ends up -- as I expect -- seeming tangential, I'll just demur in advance.
And whose fault is that? If you and other readers would properly assimilate information, the discussion would not need to be repeated over and over again.