I would love to be able to increase block size. But I have serious doubts about being able to do this safely at this time given what we presently know about the Bitcoin network. And I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this sentiment.

Had we been working on fixing the known issues that most complicate bigger blocks in the last six years, or even in the last three years after many issues had already been well-identified, perhaps we'd be ready to increase the limit. But other things have seemed more important, like specifying the use of X.509 overlay protocols or adding complex filtering mechanisms to the p2p protocol to make it practical to use tx merkle trees...and as a result we're not ready for safely allowing larger blocks.

- Eric