Whether we like it or not, Bitcoin simply cannot hardfork while a large part of the community does not consent to it.
You seem to recognize exactly that a non-consensus hardfork is not necessary and is potentially damaging, so I remain a bit unclear regarding what fruitfulness comes from your going around polling people in the bitcoin community regarding what kind of scenarios they believe in which a hardfork would be a good thing?
There are real improvements that can be made to Bitcoin with a hardfork.
If the community could come to agreement on it, it would help Bitcoin compete in the near term at least.
Likely, I do not understand technicalities sufficiently; however, I thought that almost all significant changes could be achieve through soft forks, so I remain uncertain why a hardfork would be even needed, unless there was some kind of technical emergency.. such as some kind of bug that allowed a maligned player to steal coins.
In other words, to attempt to rush consensus seems to be an unnecessary (and potentially dangerous and damaging) alteration of bitcoin's governance, rather than attempts at addressing any kind of necessary technical resolution.