Well, if we start getting pedantic :-) smaller blocks also mean more block headers, which also hampers performance. On the flip side, I don't think mined block

Well, if we start getting pedantic :-) smaller blocks also mean more block headers, which also hampers performance. On the flip side, I don't think mined blocks typically take more than five seconds, due to the efficiency of the highly-branching network (though I haven't looked at the numbers to confirm this...) But I admit I hadn't thought about that extra detail, thank for pointing it out.