Luckily most mining pools are intelligent and have our best interests in mind like most of the developers and these drastic steps likely will never be needed.
Its a fatal misapprehension to believe that any actor in Bitcoin has your best interests in mind. Bitcoin works because everyone can work to their own advantage. Its been designed that these interests naturally self align without any central coordinating function.
There is no invisible hand here - and devs have no business guiding anyone.
Satoshi obviously understands human nature and planned Bitcoin accordingly. One of the mistakes he admitted was offering no reward for running a full node. People still do it with the best interests of the network in mind, but there are decreasing numbers of people prepared to do it for nothing. There would be an order of magnitude more nodes if people were rewarded for running one.
Having a decent wallet would help too. Switched to Electrum today, I really got sick of of the QT-wallet fucking up the block-index, verifying stuff for no apparent reason and for looking fugly while doing it. I never could wrap my head around why not more energy was put into a more sexy looking and properly working wallet... Except I understand a lot of ppl think the end user is not that important, BTC was designed purely for either tech nerds or speculators, buying a cup of coffee and running a cool wallet at home is supposed to be done with other crypto's like DASH?
Electrum is not a full node ....