But lets not forget that another curcial difference that increasing the blocksize will make is it will increase the IBD (initial blockchain download)
But it takes the average computer DAYS to do that now, it's a non-starter until days turns into hours.
lets not forget a crucial thing. the blockchain never syncs.... every ~10minutes its always adding more data. it never stops..
secondly.
the thing that actually pee's people off is not the IBD itself but the side-effect that when they import keys they cannot see an uptodate balance for days to be able to spend their coins straight away.
a fix would be for nodes to grab an existent UTXO set from a peer(or 2 for comparison) FIRST and let the GUI run as a litenode while then making the IBD more of a background activity that doesnt delay utility.
(come on carlton you are an armory fanboy afterall, i would have thought even you would have conceived an idea that a node 'could' initially function as a litenode during the IBD time)
as for hardware
on average people upgrade their hardware every 2-5 years anyway, and telecommunications companies have a 5 year plan (fibre & 5G).
knowing that
bitcoin (pre libsecp256k1) was able to run on a raspberryPi1 ... and knowing (post libsecp256k1 efficiency) along with a raspberryPi3 allows for alot more 'capability' (20x-60x) means that minimum hardware compared to 5 years ago has much more allowances.. so stagnating bitcoin based on tech/stats that are 5-8 years outdated becomes foolish.
do you think activation halts its Call of Duty game production based on having to get it to be compatible with 8 year old tech.. nope.