So, it wasn't technically the ASICs fault, but couldn't they still be a precursor to the problem? People can mine at a faster rate, so they become more willing to spend btc, causing more transactions, especially if people are purchasing high dollar items, like the ASICs, with btcs. Whereas before, when it took longer to amass btcs, people were more likely to hoard them instead of spending them.
Again, the answer is "No". People are mining at a faster rate, but the purpose of difficulty is to keep the supply of Bitcoins generated at 6 blocks an hour. If everyone was still using CPUs, the difficulty would be lower, and the network would be generating the same amount of Bitcoins per day, but we would have the same problem with transactions that resulted in the 0.7 vs 0.8 fork.
People are more willing to spend Bitcoins because there are ~10,900,000 million BTC that have been already mined and in the market today, so people are willing to spend what they have. And large value transactions (like those that result from purchasing ASICs) are not what necessitated the need for larger block sizes. It was the sheer number of transactions that are going on continually, which is a sign of increased Bitcoin Adoption, which I consider to be a good thing.
If you're looking for someone to blame, a lot of people point the finger at SatoshiDice. SD generates a very LARGE number of very small transactions constantly, which is exactly what caused this problem.
