I don't see why this has to be made into a personal dispute.
Namecoin has more serious problems to deal with rather than someone squatting domains.
Namecoin's brand value is literally being stole by a couple of for-profit corporations attempting to patent .bit domains and us as a community couldn't even get together to file a letter of protest for 50$ so the patent office is made aware of Namecoin's prior use of the technology.

Now this, this is an existential threat for bitcoin. People are going to look up the history of decentralized domains and it would of been erased by corporations if we don't act.
If you want to preserve Namecoin's protocol, go ahead and hard fork.

The biggest issue here, and what's enabling all these problems, is that nobody bothers anymore. The community left Namecoin to be forgotten and the few people bothering maintaining it (maybe rightly so) are taking many decisions without asking anyone, occasionally prioritizing personal gain. Make no mistakes though, it's not their fault for looking into personal gain. They're using the protocol to advance their personal interests but nowhere does it say that this isn't allowed. Instead of whining, WE should be taking action.

Keep in mind that personal benefit is vital to advancing anything. Even not for profit FOSS development orgs have people working in salaried positions and money to go around from grants. But do keep in mind, that as things stand, no matter how many domains someone squats, without demand, the protocol is bound to fail. So if anyone was even squatting 100% of Namecoin domains, there's very little to gain, let alone for development incentives. Protocol sustainability wasn't very well thought out in Namecoin sadly.

Ask yourself this.
Do you have a developer by your side?
Do you have a good idea how to make the protocol more trustless and self-sustained while preventing squatting?
If yes, build it. Fork it.

I can tell you with certainty that if you can find someone to develop this and devise a plan, pools holding the majority hashrate for NMC would support the hard fork.
Namely antpool, f2pool, viabtc and kucoin pool and any miner with ties to China would 100% support this fork (same way they did with BCH, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin GOD, ETC... You get the idea. ). These are still a tightly knit community so if they stood to gain anything they would support the fork and the new NMC would 100% become the winning chain, effectively returning the squatters to null.

As of the community, between the 10 people that even remember what Namecoin is, I'm sure many would welcome such changes. But that doesn't even matter anyway because Namecoin as it stands is dead community-wise. If anyone bothered to revive it in the slightest, the new community of users would overpower any old one.

TL;DR:
The issue isn't the few people left deving for Namecoin, it's the lack of a community. If you care, build something better and a hardfork is almost 100% guaranteed to receive support.