Excellent, thought provoking, post. I love learning about Bitcoin from Antonopoulos as he's got significantly deep knowledge and understanding of it and has been involved in the space for a long-time. I also agree with his perspective on this although I haven't heard a lot of other people speaking about Bitcoin in that way.

I think the hard fork needs to happen as Bitcoin really needs a solution to the issues it's been facing for a while. Litecoin successfully implemented SegWit and hopefully bitcoin will implement that (or some version of that) too.