After pondering this a bit more, I think that agreeing on some economical aspects of the protocol in the future is exactly what Bitcoin is for. It gets people to talk, to become participative in decision making with their actions, something that our society mostly lacks today.

Bitcoin is an icebreaker, that teaches us how to solve world problems in a distributed way without delegating our decision making to other people. Forking the protocol is a good example, we are just testing the water here. I appreciate the fact, that opposition to the fork is persistent and articulate, though this time around it would seem that increasing of the block limit is a natural evolution of the system.