I suppose by that argument the Russian revolution (to use one of countless examples) was, by definition, not a 'hostile' fork since it was democratic.
In any conflict, once the first shot is fired all involved parties are are appropriately labeled 'belligerents'. As to who 'started it', that is left to the history books and these are, as they say, 'written by the victors.'
The fundemental error here is failing to recognize the voluntary nature of currency adoption.
Gavin proposed a change to Bitcoin that users are free to accept or decline.
That some developers interpreted this as a threat and turned it into a battle only shows the weakness of their position.
The proper response would have been to convince people to not choose the change by explaning why they would be better of by doing so.
Instead, they acted with outrage over the idea that somebody proposed something without their permission and was doing a better job of convincing people that they'd benefit from his proposal instead of theirs.
This is not a sustainable position for them. Money is only as valuable as there are other people willing to accept it, and nobody is in a position to force anybody to accept Bitcoin.
People who act on the expectation that their opinions are right by default because they were there first and so aren't subject to continual validation in the marketplace of ideas are going to end up losing everything.
I personally see the bloat push as a threat because it is exactly how I would attack the system if I were chartered to come up with a strategy for doing so. That is the first thing that hit me years ago when I put my mind to figuring out how it could be done.
This bloat push has happened periodically over the last number of years. It was strong enough for me to diddle around philosophically with a variety of ideas, most of which pivot off of my initial conception of how to safely scale using subordinate chains. Thankfully a lot of folks who are a lot more dedicated and a lot more capable than myself have carried this ball forward and have made giant progress toward a genuine scaling scheme which not only solves the scaling problems but adds a lot more capabilities that I didn't even imagine.
If you see 'outrage' on the part of the core devs and folks like me, it is mostly associated with the way Hearn (and by extension, Gavin) went about trying to get bloat stuffed in. Covertly meeting with power-players inside and outside the ecosystem and trying to switch to a 'benevolent dictator' mode of code control seems outrageous to many of us because it is outrageous.
I think that the 'proper response' from the Blockstream guys and other's of their ilk would be to take off the gloves and go bare knuckles against the attackers, but they seem to cultured and to busy doing real work. That's probably just as well because my instinct on this could well be wrong.