Not quite. The ecosystem was much smaller back then. Nowadays, I'm not sure one company would be able to make a case for forking the currency.

Besides, you can still buy ETH classic, if you disagree with the decision. It's just not worth much.

Ethereum EIP-999 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16843991 and https://github.com/5chdn/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-999.md) is exactly that, a discussion of patching Ethereum to unlock a a few hundred million dollars that are inaccessible due to a software bug.

It's almost definitely not going to happen.

I am 100% sure that if I went and "the code is the contract"ed whatever ends up being DAO2.0 out of 5% of all existing ETH, that Vitalik would come save it "just this once" one more time... I absolutely do not believe for one second that there wouldn't be another fork. And I say this as someone with a substantial interest in the currency.

Well, the point is, Vitalik can't do that. The community would have to agree with him.

If the situation were sufficiently dire, then presumably it would be easy to get community support. But the opposite is true too.

Nope, won't happen again. Look at EIP-999. It's backed by Vitalik but is still dead.

EIP-999 isn't backed by Vitalik but it was backed by major figures in Ethereum, including at least one co-founder. And yes it's dead.