I don't get all this hand-wringing about hard forks.

Everyone is paranoid that their fork won't be popular (whether among end-users or miners).

They seem to forget that on a world scale, nobody gives a crap about bitcoin still. Whether your fork occupies 0.0004% or 0.00004% of the world money supply is a rather minor distinction.

Look at it another way, would it be that horrible if your fork of bitcoin was "only" as popular as bitcoin was in 2011? That didn't stop anyone in 2011. And your fork would be way easier to use than bitcoin was then.

Put yet another way, I'd rather bitcoin be "right" than "popular". Whichever fork is what I want, that's what I'm going to use. If I wanted a "popular" currency and payment system, the dollar and Visa would be obvious choices, but that's not what any of us want.