No central authority - well at least until we hit a small technological bump and it becomes mildly annoying - then we will solve the problem with a decree or fiat.
An open source software project has to make policy decisions. They've been making these kinds of decisions for years. In fact, there used to be (a long time ago) a rule that outputs smaller than .01 BTC were not relayed.
The "no central authority" concept is from a different context, i.e., the fact that a decentralized Byzantine consensus type scheme is being used to guard against double-spends and to control minting, instead of an individual company or bank or government (i.e., "authority").
Update changes a hard coded limit to a setting with a default value. IE easily changeable. So it's more like a guideline. So basically they went in the opposite direction of a dictate with this release.
For typical users I totally agree. My sense is that the miners who run the nodes probably are pretty comfortable tweaking settings. So as a developer who I dare say is worth his salt I'd agree with this regarding a general population, but not the group that's currently running the nodes.
