I think you have this completely wrong. Bitcoin avoids hard forks by all means, they implement soft forks. Ethereum uses hard forks often an liberally. This ne

I think you have this completely wrong. Bitcoin avoids hard forks by all means, they implement soft forks. Ethereum uses hard forks often an liberally. This new change is a hard fork. In a hard fork those that want to stick with the old rules of the game are not coerced to follow the new ones, they can just follow their way. In fact, there has been talk of creating an ETHPoW which would continue the PoW chain. We will see how that pans out but is likely to be a mayor flop because support for it is negligible.