Price will be ruined due to Core dragging their feet over a block size increase and generally fucking around prioritising technical perfection over actual usefulness and being totally unwilling to compromise. This is why alts are rapidly gaining on BTC.

If a fork causes Bitcoin to crash hard, then frankly, it deserves to, since this can happen at any point in the future.

Two coins would be the best solution at this time. All current hodlers have coins on both chains. One chain can scale on chain, be actually used as a payment system, the other chain can play at being digital gold and pray that lightning network is somehow better than on chain payments.

At least with a fork current hodlers will own both the gold and the payment network. No fork means an altcoin will eat Bitcoin's payment network market share.

A fork should make everybody happy. Except Vinny, who needs to cry some more.