A hard fork wouldn't necessarily require a change in governance. It could easily be implemented by the Core team, and I would personally feel more secure if it was.
Their incentives to avoid a hard fork aren't really to do with power, more to do with what their preferred method of scaling is (offchain scaling combined with a fee market on the chain, from what I can gather).
Well onchain scaling can only take us so far, and can quickly become a slippery slope turning Bitcoin into Paypal 2.0. I understand their reasoning perfectly well, and even Segwit with 2MB blocks (with blocks of up to 4MB max under certain conditions) was already something not every Core developer was happy with but they still implemented due to pressure on them from the community to allow bigger blocks. I am not against hard forks, but I think it would be wise to see the results of Segwit first before deciding on how and when to hard fork. Rushed hard forks are not a good thing, but if there is to be one in 6 months after Segwit activation it should be the amended proposal made by Calvin Rechner as explained here:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-May/014445.htmlThis proposal actually has the support of some Core devs as well so I think it has the best chance to succeed as a compromise.