Alan Reiner (Armory lead developer) weighs in and clearly shows that he understands the Big Picture.
What he writes deserves to be memorialized here as it is pertinent to the whole spirit of "Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP"

Quoted text below

This *is* urgent and needs to be handled right now, and I believe Gavin
has the best approach to this.  I have heard Gavin's talks on increasing
the block size, and the two most persuasive points to me were:

(1) Blocks are essentially nearing "full" now.  And by "full" he means
that the reliability of the network (from the average user perspective)
is about to be impacted in a very negative way (I believe it was due to
the inconsistent time between blocks).  I think Gavin said that his
simulations showed 400 kB - 600 kB worth of transactions per 10 min
(approx 3-4 tps) is where things start to behave poorly for certain
classes of transactions.  In other words, we're very close to the
effective limit in terms of maintaining the current "standard of
living", and with a year needed to raise the block time this actually is
urgent.

(2) Leveraging fee pressure at 1MB to solve the problem is actually
really a bad idea.  It's really bad while Bitcoin is still growing, and
relying on fee pressure at 1 MB severely impacts attractiveness and
adoption potential of Bitcoin (due to high fees and unreliability).  But
more importantly, it ignores the fact that for a 7 tps is pathetic for a
global transaction system.  It is a couple orders of magnitude too low
for any meaningful commercial activity to occur.  If we continue with a
cap of 7 tps forever, Bitcoin *will* fail.  Or at best, it will fail to
be useful for the vast majority of the world (which probably leads to
failure).  We shouldn't be talking about fee pressure until we hit 700
tps, which is probably still too low.

You can argue that side chains and payment channels could alleviate
this.  But how far off are they?  We're going to hit effective 1MB
limits long before we can leverage those in a meaningful way.  Even if
everyone used them, getting a billion people onto the system just can't
happen even at 1 transaction per year per person to get into a payment
channel or move money between side chains.

We get asked all the time by corporate clients about scalability.  A
limit of 7 tps makes them uncomfortable that they are going to invest
all this time into a system that has no chance of handling the economic
activity that they expect it handle.  We always assure them that 7 tps
is not the final answer.

Satoshi didn't believe 1 MB blocks were the correct answer.  I
personally think this is critical to Bitcoin's long term future.   And
I'm not sure what else Gavin could've done to push this along in a
meaninful way.

-Alan

P2P don't react per futur anticipation ... that why P2P survive from 17 years now (in file sharing).
They see ... and ... they make correction.

We don't play like FED or BOJ or BCE ... with god prediction.
We wait ... see ... and make correction.

Like normal people.

Yes, it is.

They used the 520 byte of the redeemScript to "inject" suitably padded text for easy recovery with strings(1) (i.e. strings -n 20).

Mike Hearn's with too much logic:

https://medium.com/@octskyward/crash-landing-f5cc19908e32

I just briefly tested mycelium + trezor.

works beautifully. Really well-implemented.

Gavin's already started coding a possible fork, you're telling me he's not well known enough in the community to get any backing? He may not go that route for political reasons, but anyone could build his code and run it.

Problem is getting a decentralized consensus. Thank you Bitcoin. ^^

On a personal note, nullc & co may be biaised by their SC stuff, I dont see how these solutions would harm Bitcoin itself, on the contrary.
Otoh, Gavin being an MIT fellow now, I am more than ever concern that he may be biaised by the US Governement.
Besides i dont really appreciate his pushy attitude and I fail to agree with his arguments (ie. his childish blog points and "kudos"), which are anything but technical btw.
Not that i am an "anti" blocksize fork forever either.

Anyway im just a regular bitcoiner, hoping it all goes for the best greater good.

i put this video up last month where Gavin clearly telegraphs what is happening now.  he said he might have to throw his weight around which is what he is now doing.  and he has the credibility to do so.  but you have to back up around 2y to understand why he's doing this.  my conspiratorial mind says this is when gmax first hatched the idea of Blockstream and started working on gathering up most of the other core devs into the scheme.  since that time, nothing substantial has gotten done around the core protocol as solex pointed out above. i say it's b/c Blockstream stands to make billions if tx's are forced off MC to SC's.  it's also the time when gmax started hitting Reddit and the forum about the SC idea.  while Gavin has always been respectful and even slightly positive about SC's, i don't think he's fully on board with the idea and i've pointed out subtle examples of such.  and for good reasons as i, and you, have tried to articulate in many settings.  but my point is, this is the setting around which his blog posts are occurring;  it's now time to open up Bitcoin to the masses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIafZXRDH7w

I just put something together on Reddit with a goal of coming up with a constructive path forward to helping advance the blockchain debate.
I care more that constructive progress is made, than how it is done. So what you see is merely one suggested path forward. It might be rejected out of hand, or it may have some merit and after Refiners have a field day with it, we would have an exciting experiment to watch.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3573iy/a_proposal_to_safely_and_constructively_advance/

Apparently they are the only developers capable of making any change at all.

Wait they're not? So what exactly is stopping some developers from coding the fork and releasing it?  Are people worried miners will attack and destroy it? That attack can't succeed in the long term. If the attack works once, you just fork again with a 1 line change to move the fork point forward. Miners are not going to keep wasting resources on that forever, once they see your fork isn't going away, they may see it as more profitable to mine on it honestly.

I'd run it, and I'd probably sell at least part of my stake in the 1mb fork.

Block size could reach the 1mb limit at any time with a massive influx of users and the chart for average block size looks like it could possibly have a sharp exponential rise hitting the limit within a short period of time, well before March 2016.

IMO, even Gavin may be to late.  Most likely, if this increase in adoption happens, transactions will be pushed off-chain to Coinbase and other services until the limit can be increased.  Anybody opposed to the block size increase doesn't even have a working solution for scale, so I don't see how their arguments can even fly.  

this is a big deal.

Benjamin M. Lawsky, Superintendent of Financial Services, today announced that the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) granted a charter under the New York Banking Law to itBit Trust Company, LLC – a commercial Bitcoin exchange. ItBit, which is based in New York City, is the first virtual currency company to receive a charter from NYDFS.

http://www.dfs.ny.gov/about/press2015/pr1505071.htm

accts also have $250K FDIC insurance.