I agree with your statement and analysis overall. Bitcoin tries to be very conservative. In the question of blocksize, keeping it small means more people can verify and that increases security. I dont think with current technology you can have fast cheap transactions that are secure and I like the decision to keep blocks small. The situation is a classical trilema, choose two out of security, speed and price. You cant have all. But I also like that there are others that have bigger blocks. We are still experimenting very much and diversity is great. 

Maybe bitcoins approach is not the winning idea, but maybe other chains will suffer attacks in the future that are not possible in bitcoin and people realise that we need as many nodes as possible. 

On many other topics we do not have such a trilemma and huge advances in user experience are possible. I think the problem is that the btc people are very theoretical and dont have the skills to deliver good user experience. People that are designing UI on the other hand dont know how to participate. There is a lot of opportunity, but it is difficult to make money and enter that space.

You asked "You're also phrasing this as if you have to sacrifice security in order to get user experience... Is that true?", and I wouldn't presume to answer that question, as phrased, because I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "user experience"

But I will state unequivocally that security and **convenience** are opposite ends of a sliding scale. More secure is less convenient, and more convenient is less secure. You cannot have both.   As Tycho Brahe (the Penny Arcade dude, not the astronomer) put it, "every avenue of convenience for the user is also a vector of exploitation".

There is no hardware solution to this conundrum, and there is no software solution. It is simply a law of the universe. The only *working* solution is compromise; you set that slider somewhere in the middle and hope for the best.