There is nothing wrong with a fork. Let's just make sure the exchanges allow the exchange of both. If there are exchanges that intentionally block one over the other, the exchange is not a supporter of free markets.
The only problem is that CURRENTLY, real world merchants like Dish, Expedia, etc will only accept "Bitcoin". They will not bother accepting two coins, so most likely the fork with less mining power will die quickly and there will be miniscule demand for it.
In the future if crypto becomes more mainstream, a fork that leaves two currencies will be more viable.
I have a question to you and other big-blockers. What would be a minimal compromise proposal you could live with?
For example I think what Adam Back mentioned on twitter was very fair:
I.e. 2 mb now ( in reality it would have to be about 6 months to a year from now)
4 mb after 2 years,
8 mb after 2 years.
If that was agreed upon and pushed into core do you think that would be an acceptable compromise? Would people drop XT then?
At this point I would say "maybe". I will have a better opinion after seeing the effects of the stress test.