Regarding the governance of the protocol, I think it is not very difficult to reach a consensus if it is a simple fact and everyone understand it. However if you go the radical or complex route, then your fork will just become orphaned
BIP101 is rather simple really which is one of its advantageous, Bitcoin Unlimited might be complex to understand in terms of all of the game theory, code and economics, however the underlying concepts are actually rather simple to understand, just like the Bitcoin protocol itself. Everyone has the freedom of choice.
I have played with several altcoins since I know bitcoin, but I quickly realized that the current cryptocurrency economy only focus on one coin, for the simple reason that people don't come here seeking for inflation. You have some mainstream economic knowledge that is weaved by banks to confuse the majority of human, so no doubt you will draw conclusions that does not fit reality (Reality is that none of the alt-coins will thrive, including banks' alt-coins)
You are repeating this false argument that altcoins and Bitcoin chain forks add inflation to a singular cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, without actually refuting my counter arguments, you are wrong in saying this.
If you look from the view of the central bank, the most important for a monetary system is trust. One of FED's mandate is moderate inflation, because hyperinflation will destroy the trust for their money.
Bitcoin however revolutionizes the concept of trust. A central bank is reliant upon trust, Bitcoin it can be said is almost the opposite, it does not require trust, it is trustless. It is only once people understand this that they can truly "trust" Bitcoin, in many ways it is anti-trust. This is a radical concept for many to understand, this is why your example is a case of false equivalence, you can not compare these two conceptions of "trust" directly in this case.
BIP 101 shakes investor trust since it is too radical, and BU is even more radical. When you are facing a change that no one has done before, you can only act conservative and prepare for the worst, not act radically and hope for the best.
That does seem like this is the engineers approach, which is good if you are an engineer, and we need engineers in Bitcoin as well as people from other fields. When facing a change that no one has done before, I think we should be brave, stick to our principles, act radically and hope for the best. After all does that not describe Bitcoin well? As far as I understand it even the design of Bitcoin is counterintuitive from an engineers perspective, it makes perfect sense in terms of the politics, game theory and economics though. Bitcoin is an example of sacrificing engineering ideals like efficiency for political advantages and principles like decentralization, after all a centralized system is far more efficient. We should not necessarily be conservative in our approach since what we are doing here is radical, much like the American revolution, Bitcoin is a grand social experiment and we need to let the experiment run its course, not stop it in its tracks because some people think that the original vision is to radical and that we should act more conservatively.