Yes i would only agree to a hardfork if it would be absolute life-death situation and they would give people enough time to prepare, but we know that there is no imminent danger to bitcoin. So the only hardfork would be improvement/patch type of hardfork, and for that there is plenty of time, like announce it 1 year ahead and let the market and the community adjust.
Exactly. The grace period should be 6 to 12 months IMO. What Gavin suggested with Classic is a joke (28 days). Businesses can't successfully develop, test and deploy in that time-frame. Even if they could, it would likely end up problematic due to it being rushed. The only way that it *may* work for e.g. <6 months if everyone was running non-custom versions of the software, which we know is not the case.
You know, what I find very unfortunate and saddening is the toxicity towards Segwit. I mean, it's a *wonderful* development that will enable Bitcoin to scale further and better. The usual fork supporters are very negative towards it, while they should be appreciative in the lines of (random generic statement) "Great development! Now we can and should plan a hard fork.". I don't participate in those subreddits, but I do read them for behavioral analysis.
But there is absolute no need for that currently, just look at the altcoins, all of them think they are superior to bitcoin in some way, but none of them come even close to bitcoin in market cap? How is this possible if they are so great.
I've seen argumentation using the fact that the Bitcoin 'dominance' percentage is at ~80%.