First I should point that I am familiar with many of the old threads and the arguments in them. Ironically I came across CryptoNote and Monero while researching these old threads. I will address first two points miner incentives and decentralization because they are both very valid. They also form part of most of the arguments against increasing the 1 MB block size limit.
Bitcoin isn't secure unless there is income to pay to apply computation to the honest chain (and thus far the alternatives appear
not clearly workable), we argue that once the subsidy is gone transaction fees will support the security. But the existence of a market for transaction fees requires a degree of scarcity to make the rational price non-zero and to encourage efficient use. Just like Bitcoin itself wouldn't be valuable if everyone had access to infinite Bitcoins, our incentives require a degree of scarcity of blockspace.
This is all very true but it can be addressed by making an increase in difficulty a necessary requirement for an increase in the blocksize limit. In short if the miners are not receiving the proper incentives then the difficulty can not also be rising at the same time. This is why I included the second requirement of a rising difficulty for a blocksize increase in my suggestion.
Blocksize has a trade-off with decentralization. If verifying the blockchain is made expensive (relative to hardware and bandwidth costs), then past some limit Bitcoin becomes a centralized system where everyone is economically forced to trust some consortium of large miners which are themselves more efficient if centralized since they can just verify once, instead of verifying for themselves. (If the economic majority is trusting and not verifying, you need to also do the same so you don't end up split from the other users of the system.)
The problem here is that a fixed blocksize does not take into account that these hardware and bandwith costs are dropping at an exponential rate. Furthermore this also does not take into account that what will likely limit the "economic majority" namely consumers form verifying transactions is not cost but rather the fact that they choose to cede control over their devices to large centralized corporations such as Apple and Microsoft. An iPad or a Surface tablet may have the processing power and memory to handle a full Bitcoin node but is not able to do so because the DRM in the device. Now for under 20% of the cost of an iPad one can purchase a used laptop running GNU/Linux that is perfectly capable of handling a full Bitcoin node. If the 1-2% of Bitcoin users, who choose to run GNU/Linux, are the only ones verifying transactions that still provides enough decentralization to secure the network. Furthermore it avoids an attack by a propriety OS vendor who could use the DRM in their OS to cripple Bitcoin. One thing we must keep in mind here is that those who run a propriety OS do not control their devices they only
think they do. Crippling Bitcoin with a 1 MB block size limit is not going to solve the centralization issue.
This brings me to the third point
Bitcoin currency throughput can be increased to arbitrary levels without increasing blocksizes, especially if you're willing to make decentralization tradeoffs. Importantly, handling high volume transactions in other ways than expressing each and every one in the global bitcoin ledger can help avoid pulling down the available security for all transactions just because a large volume of low value transactions need the throughput and can accept the lower security. Work in this space has been under-developed, but I'm not aware of anyone disagreeing with the broad possibilities here. Because of the lack of need until now it's only recently become possible to raise substantial funding for work in this space.
True but this is essentially self defeating. If it turns out that a centralized or semi centralized solution can be competitive with Bitcoin in certain situations then so be it. This however should be a result of true market forces and not an arbitrary limit placed on Bitcoin.
Edit: With respect to CryptoNote and Monero, I do see merit in the argument that the fee penalty alone may not be enough to constrain blocksize; however when combined with the difficulty increase requirement the picture changes. As for the specifics of the Monero blockchain there are also other factors including dust from mining pools that led to the early bloating, and we must also keep in mind the CryptoNote and Monero also have built in privacy which adds to the blocksize by its very nature.