I am not scared by increased usage, though: more usage and adoption means more investment, more smart engineers, and more people with incentives to solve whatever scaling problems crop up. All of that makes Bitcoin stronger.

And I don't feel like this process has been hurried: I've been working on this (thinking, testing, simulating, talking, writing code, talking to key people and companies) almost exclusively since late last year. In my humble opinion, BIP 101 is a good compromise between "no limit, let the miners decide" and "lower the max size so a raspberry pi running on a 56K modem can be a full node."