You are saying that a hard fork is mutually assured destruction? That is hyperbole, the ability to hard fork and split is what ensures the continued freedom of the protocol. If I believed what you did I would instantly leave Bitcoin because I would realize that it was doomed, fortunately I have a different understanding of how this works.
This is also why Jeff Garzik call a hard fork an extinction level event
Recently I noticed another post
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/3t4kbk/forkology_301_the_three_tiers_of_investor_control/ It says that investors can already bet on the fail of one fork by sign a future contract to sell one coin for another coin at a certain exchange rate before the fork (for example, one contract is based on the sell of 1000 XT coins for 1000 core coins, and the actual execution rate might be 500, so that you get only 500 core coins for 1000 XT coins due to too many XT sell order than buy order). Thus the fate of that fork is more or less already decided even before the fork, to make sure those sure losers giving up the idea of fork (When you know for sure that your fork will die, would you still do that?)
I would not bet on the outcome of such a fork, and I would not be so sure of the outcome either. Having prediction markets for this type of thing is interesting though. I would be happy as long as either side can have the Bitcoin they want regardless of the support that they gain. I do not see any reason why two chains with the same genesis block can not live side by side in peace.
Jeff Garzik does actually support hard forking in order to increase the blocksize, he has also even recently spoken out against Core pointing out some of the same grievances we have. I would recommend that everyone reads this: