Wouldn't be easier for people to just start over with a new currency than deal with a hard fork?
Exactly. The confidence in Monero after the hard fork will be shuttered. It's much better to admit it and try again with new coin than to let the whole concept limp in the future because of the initial design problems.
If this hypothetical "perfect" cryptocurrency is ever designed, we can cross that bridge then. Hypothetically telling everyone how the hypothetical users of a cryptocurrency would react to a hypothetical hard fork brought on by the introduction of a hypothetical perfect cryptocurrency is...well...nothing more than your hypothesis.
I'm not talking some far-in-the-future hypothesis. I'm talking about the fact that Monero's blockchain is exploding in size with negligible amount of transactions it now process. There's no PHD needed to see that with anything close to BTC amount of transactions it would making running the full Monero node unsustainable for most users. There's many things I like in Monero, but if something looks unrepairable without dreaded hard fork, why not take the best from Monero and move it to a new currency which doesn't have the super-fat blockchain problem?