I'm curious. It was mentioned that there will come a time that Monero won't be doing the bi annual hard forks in the future as the coin becomes big enough that any hard fork could get risky. Does that mean ASIC's could come anyway?
If bi-annual hard forks are a known part of the social contract I don't see them ever becoming risky. Unless there is a fracture in the values, direction and vision of the core dev team, in which case it could make hard forks difficult even when Monero was still relatively small.
I think your second scenario is inevitable. Eventually a faction will form for one reason or another. In fact I think we can already see the seeds of it some reddit posts, or considering MoneroV.
But just like bitcoin Monero has to survive this sort of turbulence. Whether scheduled hard forks survive or not is another question.