8-10 exahash and climbing.  That's a pretty phenomenal achievement.  The hashrate has just about quintupled within 12 months.  If the trend continues, we might even hit peaks of 11 or 12 EH/s by the time of the fork.  I'd say difficulty will absolutely be a factor if miners aren't backing down.  Something fairly drastic will need to be done on the minority chain to make it slightly less excruciating to transact on.  That, or users on the SegWit-Only chain, if they really feel that strongly about it, will just have to forego transacting for a while until the next adjustment (or possibly a few adjustments) occurs.


//EDIT:  Some of the miners do now seem to be backing down, so we'll see if that's the start of a trend.