> Had the block-size been increased, Bitcoin would be much more useful as a means of exchange (more transactions would be processed, and they would be cheaper).

Of course the flipside of this is that it would become very expensive to run a node. Bitcoin's blockchain is ~400 GB after 13 years. BCH has a 32x larger blocksize cap, so we can extrapolate that if anyone actually used that fork, it would grow a 12 TB blockchain over that same period. As a result running a node would become expensive and the network would become much less decentralized (the very thing people are complaining about in this thread!)