What a messy day! My thoughts on the current situation.
Full disclosure I own both Ether and DAO tokens (however much more Ether than DAO tokens).
The DAO woke people up to the potential of Ethereum and was likely the catalyst that helped get it to where it is today. Being the most successful kickstarter ever had a very positive effect on Ethereum. The soft and eventual hard fork I understand and respect the reasoning behind. A lot of money was invested by many thousands of individuals and it could be argued that even without The Dao getting off the ground, it's what really set Ethereum in motion.
Giving back stolen funds to these early investors makes sense as they took the risk and helped with the popularity and growth of Ethereum as a whole.
People are freaked out about the ability to even do a fork or even at the suggestion of the idea of a fork. If you look back at Bitcoin's history hard forks happened when mistakes are made, I believe it's built into all PoW type systems. Of course this hard fork is for a much more serious reason than Bitcoin's. NXT coin went through something similar (I need to do more research here) but it looks like they ignored doing a hard fork and the community split and never recovered.
What bothers me is I don't like seeing is the lack of trust in the leaders of this space. It's a logical fallacy to conclude that "if they make this one exception of giving back money that was stolen due to a code error, what sort of <potentially evil deed> will do they do the next time?" This is nonsense. Look at the track records and transparency of the leaders of Ethereum, there's nothing to suggest they will do <something evil> in the future.
Also consensus is still being sought before any action takes places. The leaders are suggesting a route but ultimately it's up to everyone who's invested in Ethereum to decide. It's a pretty big stretch to say this is centralization by the higher ups making rash decisions when they're asking the community to decide.
I could understand the resistance if The DAO was introduced recently for Bitcoin given how mature the Bitcoin platform is but Ethereum is still in its infancy, it's still being (feverishly and tirelessly) worked on as the go to platform to build and run your ideas and applications on.
The ideal platform.
The leaders in the space have been very transparent about the strengths and weaknesses of Ethereum. The creators of The DAO have as well. This particular contract code blunder is a perfect example of "working out the bugs" while an application matures. This flaw was only recently discovered and disclosed (irresponsibly disclosed from the looks of it) but given the utility of Ethereum compared to other crypto platforms it makes sense there will be more risk and vulnerabilities to deal with as Ethereum simply does a lot more. There will also potentially be even larger problems down the road given the feverish development pace and goals set.
The analogy of bailout being made is strange to me as well. There's no bailout being proposed as no funds have actually been transferred! This thief can be stopped with code ahead of time! This isn't a situation where the housing bubble burst due to a bunch of lying banksters selling defunct subprime mortgages masked as AAA. There's really no comparison here. So the fear of "precedent being set" by the leaders making future unwise decisions holds no weight. I'm not suggesting this can't happen but it's very unlikely to. Plus they're giving us the option to choose, they're not dictating the path. Think about that for a moment. The FUD that is being spread is really unfounded.
So in conclusion I don't think a hard fork would put the future of Ethereum at risk. I believe if we don't do our best to ensure the stolen funds don't end up in the theifs wallet, more confidence will be lost by these same investors and will likely lead to a bunch of risk averse people not investing in new ideas for the Ethereum platform stagnating the platform.
I'll plead a bit of ignorance here, but my recollection is that the DAO launched quite a bit after the big rise in Eth value. IIRC from you posts it launched end of April and Eth had already crossed 0.02BTC at the start of March and reached it ATH in mid-March at 0.035. The price has of Eth has actually been reasonably stable relative to BTC in the last few months, the primary driver on the massive appreciation of all the alt coins lately has been that after sitting around $400 for pretty much all of 2016 BTC decided to almost double in value the last 3 weeks.
I don't think the hardforks early on in Bitcoin's life are directly comparable to this situation. In those cases, hard forks were needed to address fundamental problems with Bitcoin itself. Here, the problem (as I understand it) isn't with Ethereum, it is with the DAO. Changes could be made to the DAO codebase that would solve this problem going forward without any changes to Ethereum itself, the reason the soft (and possible hard) fork is happening is just to limit the damage caused by the vulnerability in DAO code.
If this is the case, it does seem to resemble the bank bailout in some ways. For someone that if holding Ether but that didn't buy into the DAO for whatever reason, changes are coming in order to make whole a private group that through their own fault lost a significant amount of money. It does set a difficult and dangerous precedent that the controlling developers of Ethereum will have to grapple with in the future.
On a more positive note, the newegg.ca refurbs are back down to $229, and the NE staff was kind enough to give me a $20/pc refund on the ones I bought yesterday.