#1: this has always been my main criticism of maximalism, it doesn't matter if it all goes to shit, it doesn't matter if it destroys you financially, it doesn't matter if you have to trust a third party, all as ling as it's Bitcoin, it shouldn't be changed because Bitcoin is pristine, pure and perfect and everything going haywire is part of the plan, all banks are a scam except for the Bitcoin only banks. The problem with removing the segwit discount for any size of TX is that whenever you have a multiple ins TX, lets say, somebody has many small UTXOs and want's to spend them all in a single TX they would be astronomically fucked because of the size of their TX. Adding to that, if I'm not mistaken it's the discount itself what solves the transaction malleability bug, so I don't find it viable to remove the discount.

#2: L2s are a necessity, doesn't matter if the blocks are 1mb or 1 trillion yottabytes, but it's clear that either 1 mb doesn't cut it anymore, or that the way that the L2s have been developed is not the right way. If LN is rhe way forward, 1MB doesn't cut it anymore, and that's clear, I'm lucky that I opened my channels at less than 20 sats/vByte, but not everyone has had the same luck, and with those high fees, the people who would want to run their own nodes will to relay on LSPs with the ability to censor them while they, themselves pay for all the fees, or directly fall back into a bank, but a Bitcoin bank.

The other option is of course, the one that doesn't need a block increase to work, drivechains, but instead of people trying to improve the BIP to solve this issue once and for all, we've spent 7 years bashing it because it "bring shitcoins to Bitcoin", well, guess what, we already have them, we have had coloured coins since the beginning, we have BRC-20s, CBRC-20s, and lets not forget about Lightning Labs developing Taproot assets, or the fact that RGB has been on the works for a long time now, somehow, they get a free pass. But the trustless edition of shitcoinery, that needs to be 1:1 backed, doesn't, because it's better to have a grudge on the guy for listening to the BCash podcast than help improve the BIP and solve the issues that are there, middle ground can be found, but clearly, one side doesn't want to, and lamentably is that side the one hurting Bitcoin the most.

#3: I get it completely, Bitcoin is hard money, and I love it for that, but there are other emerging properties such as censorship resistance and actual ownership that are being priced out for most people. It started as an alternative to the banks but if we continue on this path of not letting it evolve, closing ourselv in an echo chamber and relegate decision making to "those who know better" who are actually doing nothing, we will have banks dominating it all over again, and it might not be hard money any longer.

Bitcoin is our tool to break the cycle of debt, there's more effort into making it easier to owe than to own.