There's been plenty of discussion (I remember reading articles about it a year before it was actually committed). It's also not even a soft fork, just a policy

There's been plenty of discussion (I remember reading articles about it a year before it was actually committed). It's also not even a soft fork, just a policy change for minors. It was in the original release of Bitcoin and removed for DoS reasons that no longer applied. Some minors had been running it previously. It's also opt in. I fail to see any reasonable way in which a blocksize increase is "comparatively trivial".