My point is that DPoS is an integral part of a system that can process that many transactions. You take away DPoS and everything changes and no, you can't say that if you removed DPoS everything would work exactly the same and the network would process just as many transactions, especially if you replace it with PoW. The network would take longer to come to consensus. The amount of energy consumed by the network in order to achieve consensus would be orders of magnitude larger and that cost would have to be paid by someone through fees. You're saying that simply because you can not draw a causal line from DPoS to more transactions, that DPoS is not integral to a system that is capable of processing that many transactions. Of course that begs the question, "Then why are no other blockchains running PoW and capable of processing that many transactions?" DPoS has many consequences within the system. Even just the fact that it enables more frequent hardforks is a factor because that enables the community to make changes to the platform that help improve performance.
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The time it takes for a network to come to consensus is the time it takes for a block to be propagated and validated across the network. That is a function of block size and network latency/bandwidth.
http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23fc0/P2P2013_041.pdf
Block time in general is a decision made as part of the protocol development, weighing the value of granularity of information vs. the fears of centralization where network latency gives an advantage to larger players working together. Ethereum and others could have chosen faster block times from a technical perspective, but weighed them up in this way.
https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/09/14/on-slow-and-fast-block-times/
In my estimation, they are just fears. Every time block time has been reduced or block sizes have been increased they have been found to work well without serious drawbacks.
I can't answer that with certainty but my view is that it is a matter of fear. There is a certain culture pervasive in the crypto community which does not seem to be or have been present in the development of Steem. Steem has firmly embraced the idea of nodes being run by institutions from the start, not held back by the expectation that end users must run full nodes to validate everything locally. Most other cryptocurrencies have inherited that from the Bitcoin community. Even Bitcoin Cash has maintained 8MB limits (despite successfully testing 1GB blocks) out of conservatism.
I agree with your points on the financial costs added to the system and the comparative ease of hard forks allowing faster development progress.
It seems Bitcoin Cash (and all associated that are now cooperating) are considering unlimited blocks, but if I understand it correctly there is still a risk (a fear and maybe just a fear, I'm not certain) that the limit is needed to avoid an attack.
I used to be sceptical of any Bitcoin forks, but as of late my respect have grown for them. The Bitcoin forks that is, not for anyone in particular that might be working on or supporting them.