Do you even realize what the other options were???
You are so stupid you don't even deserve the opportunity to own a computer.
The other option was for people had to learn a hard lesson from their mistakes, and mintpal to make it right. Now, MintPal gets off almost scott free, and nobody learns anything.
As for the idiots saying bitcoin has done this before - that's completely untrue.
The bitcoin community has twice previously encouraged miners to use a specific client to cause one fork to win out over another. Neither of these cases had anything to do with stolen coins on an exchange, both forks had something directly to a fault in the bitcoin source code. HUGE difference. And, each time bitcoin did this, it was by consensus of the entire mining community...
Proof of Share - aka, Proof of Nothing...