The real satoshi told you what happens to
minority forks ...
A second version would be a massive development and maintenance hassle for me. It's hard enough maintaining backward compatibility while upgrading the network without a second version locking things in. If the second version screwed up, the user experience would reflect badly on both, although it would at least reinforce to users the importance of staying with the official version. If someone was getting ready to fork a second version, I would have to air a lot of disclaimers about the risks of using a minority version. This is a design where the majority version wins if there's any disagreement, and that can be pretty ugly for the minority version and I'd rather not go into it, and I don't have to as long as there's only one version.
I know, most developers don't like their software forked, but I have real technical reasons in this case.
...snip...
were there not two versions of the client early one? the official of course but also a second one written from scratch independently updated to be protocol level compatible by someone else. satoshi could ignore it so no extra work for him. as a second client can be useful in case a bug takes out one version. but core has been amazingly robust though.
but maybe im thinking ethereum.. i know that one had a couple.