More than one fork of Bitcoin can and should coexist. There's no reason why miners couldn't run different codes. The worst that can happen is that some blocks

More than one fork of Bitcoin can and should coexist. There's no reason why miners couldn't run different codes. The worst that can happen is that some blocks are not accepted by the majority and those miners loose the reward. This is perfectly ok and will only push the competing softwares (and miners) to some sort of consensus. I agree that the opinion you layout above is probably what the majority of Bitcoiners believe but I don't think it's right. A diversity of code would improve the Bitcoin ecosystem and distribute the control which is currently centralized on the "Core" devs.