Thanks for the overview. Very helpful to someone w/ no previous knowledge.
Why did the majority of developers not want to raise the block size? / How exactly does it make nodes much more expensive to operate?
Why did the majority of developers not want to raise the block size? / How exactly does it make nodes much more expensive to operate?
The direction of development is really controlled by a handful of people and they also have control of 3 of the historically important Bitcoin discussion forums so they were able to control the narrative for years and push out anyone who brought up contrarian opinions on the block size.
The fear is that eventually, only major companies and universities will be running Bitcoin nodes. This could make it easier for governments to threaten all involved parties into changing or dismantling the system.
However, those who want to raise the block size say that government agents threatening Bitcoin node operators is not a realistic fear. Whereas, if transactions can't go through because the network refuses to scale, then businesses will abort their plans to accept Bitcoin. To big blockers, such a scaling failure is much more likely to kill Bitcoin than government agents in dark suits.
All of those are relative, and part of tradeoffs with other values. If you think those are the only important properties of a currency, you're missing the entire motivation behind crypto currencies.