There can be no compromise in this debate since it is about the hardfork
mechanism itself, not scaling. The scaling debate is only the tool currently
being used to push for a hardfork.
Strictly speaking, when the miners raised the block limit they accepted, in the past, from, say, 500 KB to 1 MB, that WAS a hard fork. Each time the miners changed the actual size of blocks they accepted to make, they applied a de facto hard fork. A hard fork has nothing to do with what piece of code is actually compiled, it is what are the *actual* de facto rules at a given point that are applied, and whether a newly allowed block would have passed the de facto rules in the past. When miners were making only 500 KB blocks, if ever a 1 MB block were made, it would have been rejected at that point by his peers, while that same block is now accepted. Hence, each time the miners rose their mutually agreed-upon accepted limit on block size, that WAS already a hard fork.
Hard forks have nothing to do with code, but have to do with what the miners actually mutually accept (of course, it must be somewhere in some form of code, they don't do it by hand). They didn't accept 1 MB blocks 5 years ago, now they do (at least, as far as I understand). So that clearly is a hard fork.
Also, one must understand that the reversal of every soft fork, is a hard fork. This means that if one accepts soft forks, and one accepts the idea of "potentially going back to what it was in case of disaster", one accepts the idea of a hard fork too.
The only fundamental difference between a soft fork, and a hard fork, is that a soft fork never gives the choice to the user in the market. If a miner majority is reached with a soft fork, other miners are FORCED to follow, and at no point, there are two chains from which a user can chose in the market and vote with his money. With a (bilateral) hard fork, in principle, two prongs can emerge, and users can vote with their money in the market.
In other words, if you are afraid of the market, never accept hard forks.
Strictly speaking you are very wrong.
The blocksize was capped at 1MB and what you are referring to is the "soft cap"
and is neither a hardfork or a softfork. You are very wrong that a block made larger
than the soft cap would have been invalidated, in fact, some miners made larger blocks
while other still mined at the lower soft cap levels. It took weeks and weeks for the
developers to get the miners to raise the cap because they didn't want to or knew
that they could. So I don't know where you are getting this nonsense.
You are wrong in many of your statements and your interpretation of words and
events are incorrect. A softfork needs 95% miner consensus, so the other miners
that are "FORCED" are 5% acceptable loss which quickly follows. In comparison,
in a hardfork, you need 95% of Miners and Verifying nodes, which is near impossible,
since some hardfork proposals themselves directly disenfranchise verifying nodes, thus
you can not normally get high verifying node consensus. The Softfork attempts to
preserve those verifying nodes, while still allowing a new feature upgrade enforced
by the miners themselves. Needing users to vote makes no sense, since the average
user has no mechanism to vote other than to run a verifying node and that is
unnecessary for softforks since the changes in a softfork are still "within the rules"
of the system. Verifying nodes only need to vote, technically, when you add something
that violates a prior rule.
Another problem with your argument, you say that bilateral hardforks are good because
the users get to choose with their money. The problem with that argument is that it
assumes Bitcoin is like a corporation that needs customers. In reality, that is what you
may want Bitcoin to become, but that is not what Satoshi envisioned. Bitcoin has one
job to do with one chain and it is either doing it well or not. The markets have no place
with the Bitcoin protocol, only security. If the markets had the power, they would destroy
security and corrupt the system the same way they corrupted the world system with
illusions. All human markets are manipulated, yet you haven't learned that lesson from
Satoshi's idea yet. Your arguments are advocating for the degradation of Bitcoin.