There are hundreds of Core developers; only about 6 of them are related to Blockstream. Your conspiracy theory does not hold up to reality.
> have intentionally kept the block size at 1MB
The block size has already been lifted to 2MB-4MB with SegWit.
> Blockstream ... support the product they're attempting to develop (lightening network layers)
Lightning Network was invented by people that have nothing to do with Blockstream, who founded their own company for that: https://lightning.engineering/team.html
There are 5 different teams developing Lightning Network implementations. Blockstream is merely responsible for the C implementation, they have no special control over Lightning.
> It's a red herring to claim larger blocks increase centralization when it's just data storage.
It's not just storage; the main issues are bandwidth, latency and IBD time. There are very real engineering limitations and trade-offs that have been discussed in depth over the years that you're just brushing off here. It's not as simple as you make it appear.