One thing that is concerning is that few in industry seem inclined to
take any development initiatives or even integrate a library. 

Um, you mean except all the people who have built more scalable wallets over the past few years, which is the only reason anyone can even use Bitcoin from their phone? Or maybe you mean initiatives like Lightning .... except StrawPay already developed something similar to the Lightning network (complete with a working GUI wallet) and were ignored by Blockstream as you prefer to write your own from scratch?

Sure, people in the industry take development initiatives. That doesn't mean their work will be recognised on this mailing list.
 
I suppose eventually that problem would self-correct as new startups would make a more scalable wallet and services that are layer2 aware and eat the lunch of the laggards. 

"The laggards" being everyone who has already invested in building Bitcoin software so far. Not a great way to frame things. Many of those "laggards" have written orders of magnitude more code than you or Gregory or Jeff, for instance.

I still think you guys don't recognise what you are actually asking for here - scrapping virtually the entire existing investment in software, wallets and tools.
 
But it will be helpful if we expose companies to the back-pressure actually implied by an O(n^2) scaling protocol and don't just immediately increase the block-size to levels that are dangerous for decentralisation security

Bitcoin does not have n-squared scaling. I really don't get where this idea comes from. Computational complexity for the entire network is O(nm) where n=transactions and m=fully validating nodes. There is no fixed relationships between those two variables.

"Exposing the companies to back-pressure" sounds quite nice and gentle. Let me rephrase it to be equivalent but perhaps more direct: you mean "breaking the current software ecosystem to force people into a new, fictional system that bears little resemblance to the Bitcoin we use today, whether they want that or not".

As nothing that has been proposed so far (Lightning, merge mined chains, extension blocks etc) has much chance of actual deployment any time soon, that leaves raising the block size limit as the only possible path left. Which is why there will soon be a fork that does it.