Bitcoin will continue to work just fine without ever having a hard fork.

For example X (window system) has 30years of backwards comparability, and still counting. - Backwards comparability is part of their user contract (note, this isn't a legal contract, rather just a contract that is kept by consensus by the Xorg developers).


If we never reach consensus for hard-forking Bitcoin, this is ok. Even if 90% hard-fork, the remaining 10% can still successfully run a bitcoin network. - This would enter into a Bitcoin civil war.

Another interesting fact is that is that is that Satoshi actually gets to decide what fork wins. People don't notice that in the case of a hard fork, Satoshi has a 1000000 BTC stake in both forks.  He can choose to sell his coins in one fork, buying more coins in the other. - This alone will dictate the winner of the fork.  So if Satoshi wants to stay at 1MB blocks - well nobody else can out-compete his economic power.