How come Core is promising a hardfork?
"We, the undersigned, support the roadmap in Capacity increases for the Bitcoin system."
https://bitcoincore.org/en/2015/12/21/capacity-increase/Link to roadmap,
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/011865.html"The segwit design calls for a future bitcoinj compatible hardfork to further increase its efficiency--"
"Further out, there are several proposals related to flex caps or incentive-aligned dynamic block size controls based on allowing miners to produce larger blocks... we don't immediately need these proposals, but they will be critically important long term."
"at some point the capacity increases from the above may not be enough... moderate block size increase proposals (such as 2/4/8 rescaled to respect segwit's increase). Bitcoin will be able to move forward with these increases when improvements and understanding render their risks widely acceptable relative to the risks of not deploying them... In Bitcoin Core we should keep patches ready to implement them as the need and the will arises, to keep the basic software engineering from being the limiting factor."