The core devs may want to change the definition of a hard fork in order to make this claim, but it has. If it had never hard forked, you could still run the original client
It's debatable what you call bitcoin, the network can only be what it is if all people agree.
Back then everyone agreed on that, plus satoshi was still present, so I think those improvements were legitimate. Not to mention that bitcoin was worth almost nothing, so it was no big deal.
However with ETH at 1 billion market cap, we have to draw a line, and say that that is enough, and keep the status quo, otherwise powergrabbers will start implementing all sorts of "patches".
A hard fork with 10 billion $ worth of bitcoins is unthinkable.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4twge6/the_ethereum_hardfork_demonstrates_why_full_nodes/I myself will become a full node from now on, to show support for Bitcoin Core, join me!1) Satoshi was long gone by the time of the event I am referring to. In fact, he was long gone before I heard of bitcoin.
2) As in war, the winners will write history, and bitcoin will be what they say it is.
3) The segwit soft fork that core is pushing so hard will allow existing full nodes to function, but they won't truly be functioning as full nodes were meant to anymore since they don't have all of the data to validate. Moreover, the newer version will support a "lighter" "full node" function that has these same flaws by design, while I'm not implying as much, this could be a false-flag-style attempt to reduce network security, so IMHO, your argument regarding power grabs seems to fall a bit short when you turn around and support core.