Great post.

Casper really is an elegant consensus mechanism with unique and attractive tradeoffs. You should check out Vitalik's posts on Casper's slashing conditions and dynamic validator sets as they both really show the care that has gone into a proper PoS design. The entire v1 implementation is fantastic - allowing for sharding and transaction finality under dynamic validator sets, the sort that will be seen running full nodes.

The great Hardfork debate we see in the Bitcoin space for more than 2 years now,
won't happen to ethereum on the basis of the difficulty bomb.

The ice age essentially forces the community to come to consensus, and initiate a full node referendum implementing one change: fix the ice age. By essentially requiring the network to hardfork at a specific point in time gives certain guarantees about the actions of the network in the future.

The ice age removes the doubt. Investors and users know that Ethereum must hardfork in the next few months or the real-world use of the network will be implemented. This helps ease the worries that surround hardforks - only present because of constant peddling by Bitcoin maximalists.