This is somewhat OT probably, but look at it this way... suppose this effort to force everyone to go and accept the hard fork doesn't go exactly the way some people think it does... the consensus / acceptance isn't there and it just flops ~ which I submit is actually an outcome with a fairly high degree of probability... suppose on the other hand there would actually occur a hard fork (which we don't need and I don't support - there are other ways to handle the issues beyond Gavin's proposal to move to XT).

In the latter example, the Confidential Transactions would still work, but it would (like a lot of things, or maybe... everything else?) be even more difficult to implement, because people would be trying to determine how to work it into _two_ big things over time rather than one (both XT and Core, because for those who do not change to the new fork [that is, who remain with their current version of their wallet software, etc] they would be with the old one and still be doing transactions, of course).

(edit:  From a post at http://cointelegraph.com/news/114505/web-wallet-providers-divided-over-andresens-20-mb-block-size-increase-proposal - Coinkite Founder and CTO Peter D. Gray commented,
"I think if no consensus is found, that we probably will not have a fork. If the major Bitcoin miners do not endorse the new specification, and Bitcoin-Xt goes in some other direction, then it would become an altcoin, and 'not bitcoin'. For hard-fork decisions like this one on the table, the miners have basically all the power needed to set policy. And that's how it should be.”)

In any event, it should be clear that the "hard fork" presents additional complications... which make things more difficult... and IMHO the hard fork is unnecessary, but I won't get into why here.

Again, I feel I am straying OT from the primary substance of this post, but maybe it was necessary to mention it anyway in response to the question presented.