That's funny about the debate. Both sides accuse the other of changing the rules. Large-blockers want to increase a parameter in the code. And small-blockers want to change Satoshi's implicit plan of increasing it as necessary.

Satoshi's assumptions in the early days about how easy it would be to make major changes to Bitcoin have very little relevance now that it's in widespread use. I think he was also planning to re-enable the disabled opcodes and various other things that are unlikely to ever happen because they'd cause a hard fork.

The opposite is the case. Satoshi's assumptions are relevant as they are the basis for the expectations people have. Departing from these visions is what upsets a lot of users, and rightly so.