Bitcoin succeeds because it proves its inability to change.
It just exists whether you like it or not and you can't control it or change the rules to your liking.
This is not completely true. Bitcoin is decentralized and anyone can add any change he wants to the protocol. But for this change to take effect, he needs to convince the majority of miners and node owners to implement the new change especially if it's a major one which require a hard fork.
I'm not going to comment about the blocksize war as am not aware of all the details but what is obvious is that the community took the right decision since bitcoin is still dominating.