You are either lying or misinformed. The "big block camp" absolutely does think a user's ability to validate the blockchain is worth keeping. This is why proposals that scale blocks according to Moore's law have been created. This is also why proposals exist which allow flexible block sizes based on need.

You are also ignoring the fact that for most of bitcoin's existence, block sizes were soft limited by miners as appropriate. With soft limited or flexible block sizes, just because big blocks are used sometimes when transaction volume is high does not mean that we will see gigabyte block sizes every 10 minutes for all of time.

The root of the debate is that small blockers have conveniently chosen to ignore the reality that markets and market participants can regulate themselves.

In the small blocker's mind, keeping the power in the user's hands means making bitcoin so expensive that the only people who can use it directly are banks and governments that offer sidechain connections to other networks. They blather on about decentralization while the reality is they are the ones creating centralization.

It is a questionably convenient choice for small blockers because it forces centralization to things that aren't actually bitcoin which is the most logical desire of governments or other bodies who wish to subvert bitcoin.

"You imply that only one camp wants to scale."

No. Go read what official Core developers like Luke-jr and Blue Hair Matt are saying.

They think that the blocksize might ALREADY be too large, and actually want to DECREASE the blocksize.

They also explicitly do not want to scale, because that would mean that transaction prices go down. They literally want block fees to be high so as to create a "fee market".

> the miners become transaction validators that can be compelled to censor certain kinds of transactions by their government

That's only true if

1) >50% of the miners are in said county (currently China)

2) >50% of the miners agree to this censorship

3) They actually know the meaning of transactions in order to filter them. Most transactions are anonymous, even the big ones. We know identities of a tiny percentage of the addresses, and most of them are not hiding. For instance, we can't figure out where Mt Gox money went - I've seen some attempts of tracing them, but it went nowhere.