I do understand that reverting is somewhat against fundamental blockchain ideals, but on the other hand – you could always just continue using Ethereum classic – if you're a more principled blockchain enthusiast.
Also the use of the word "embarassing" makes me wonder if you truly understand what massive efforts it takes to create something as ambitious as Ethereum without running into some critical bugs.
What made the fork controversial was that it wasn't a bug in Ethereum itself (Bitcoin also had a fork due to a code bug and that was wholly uncontroversial), but rather a bug in a single contract.
Bugs in contracts will always happen, since, well, it's code. Code has bugs. What's makes it funny is that the investment terms page explaining the contract was extremely clear that the contract code itself were the only terms that mattered, not any "intent". Everyone who invested agreed to the bug, even if they didn't know about it.
Ethereum was forked to revert the loss of funds (about 3% the current supply of ETH I think) of users of a specific (but popular) buggy contract. Ethereum itself would have survived without the fork.
The Bitcoin bug enabled an attacker to create ~184 billion Bitcoin, resulting in something like 50,000% inflation. Not reverting that would absolutely have killed Bitcoin.