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Well, it turns out I was wrong. Theres no need for people like me who tell everyone that splitting is ok. If a split needs to happen, it will just happen. No ado, no fuss, no worries, and not much planning either people cared deeply enough that they just choose to ignore the reigning authoritys version of the code, and viola, a split is born. (Im only 40% serious here despite everything, I still think posts like this are important.)
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Thanks for the very thought provoking post Meni.
It may well be the most truly revolutionary component of satoshi's invention: While the system is operationally managed by machine law, there are always economic forces interacting with it and each other, and in a sense, the psychology of the market rules the machines. Once the genie is out of the bottle, it innately refuses to go back in, constantly reinventing itself to resist capture by those that would harness it for personal gain.
Forking away for ideological reasons is always an inherent right, but it will probably fail unless there is a significant psychological and economic power that is served by or attracted to it. Matters of proportional value between forks will be arbitrated on the exchanges.
I'm of the opinion that hard forks are a sort of honest referendum on economic changes to the system. And in contrast, soft forks that change economic rules (segwit)... are subverting that potential referendum, avoiding it, dragging powerless individual users along... without active consent. However, if the number of those who disagree with the soft fork is strong enough... they might be capable of successfully forking off too.
A hard fork makes forking off much easier for the party in disagreement, and this isn't a bad thing, it's maximizing economic choices in the marketplace. This mimics the system of mutation and adaptation at work in the natural world, and is much more likely to survive in the long term vs monolithic and ideologically centralized development decision structures.