Who would you rather be? The Software developer that has to rewrite the software of your protocol to fork away from the ASIC, or the Hardware manufacturer who changes the Algo to hash on the new forked protocol? I'll take the latter....every time.
This is a separate topic on it's own but i would pick the former, software developer, any time. It's simply much more profitable to do so.
Imagine how much power and money Vitalik has, with a click of his fingers he could influence the entire ETH dev team to fork and destroy the E3. He could also short and destroy mining or the entire ETH network by uploading some bad code. He knows exactly when updates are going to happen beforehand and could even use this opportunity to buy ETH before it pumps. It is so profitable to be Vitalik Buterin.