A contentious fork on the other hand is a much riskier and more damaging event.
And a contentious fork in an emergency/panic is an even much more riskier and much more damaging event.
The whole point of planning and carrying out the fork in the near term is to preempt significant growth to prevent an emergency situation where the hard fork is done in a panic. That could be even worse. It is better to do it now when people are calm (mostly) and are thinking rationally (mostly) and various proposals can be heard and discussed. You never want to fix a problem when it becomes a problem.
But there will be no emergency. If there is panic it will be unwarranted, as it is now.
Nothing serious or bad will happen if we touch the limit. Its not a big deal.
You never want to fix a problem when it becomes a problem.
Why? premature scaling is often the cause of the death of many businesses. The reality is fixing problems when they occur is often the pragmatic way to go.
Right now people are stressing about what I consider to be an imagined problem that will not occur. I can see no clear reasoning or evidence for the emergency scenario.
You always have to weigh issues up individually to be honest. Sometimes dealing earlier is a good choice, sometimes not.
It might even be a good thing if we hit the limit if it creates a fee market and incentivises better scaling solutions.
We are panicking now about an event that could be mildly positive or mildly negative, that probably will not occur anyhow.