I do wonder how much a new algorithm will scare people.
Sha and Scrypt are the two main kinds that most mining applications / pools support.
People can also see a coin's worth on CoinWarz if it is Sha or Scrypt.
Sure there may be asics coming out but it is still twice as profitable mining Sha coins for the same cost in hardware plus there are so many alt coins out there to mine now.

If we switch to any other algorithms it couldn't be cpu minable as cpu mining are very slow on the average computer but bots and asics could do it quickly, It would have to be gpu mining, which in a sense are still asics and have gpu server farms everywhere.
The only way to stop these farms with their incredibly efficient and expensive gpu devices is to make it so difficult for them to mine that they would lose money over power costs. This would also make the average person not be able to mine without technically losing money with their slower and more power intensive hardware.

Is there any algorithm that anyone knows of that would actually make a hard fork at this stage worthwhile?
If we are starting the campaign tomorrow, then it can also be off putting to many people with the terms of a hard fork.