Why I think there may be a real chance of Ethereum hard fork in light of the recent “Accident”:
The amount that got stuck in Parity multi-sig wallets is $150m-$280m, by various accounts. That represents ~0.5-1% of all Ether in circulation. How important is this 1%?
Multi-sigs are mostly used by entities, and is a requirement for ICOs, so some of this crypto probably represents users’ contributions to those ICOs. It remains to be seen which projects were affected and how "important" they are.
Quite a large chunk of frozen Ether (~$90m) are the funds from the recently concluded and very important for network Polkadot ICO (Web3 Foundation). Gavin Wood and Co are quite important and influential figures in Ethereum
That considered, unless they’ll be able to find another viable solution to recover all that got stuck in limbo, a fork is a possibility. That will probably leave us with Ethereum and, following the naming tradition, Ethereum Post Modern.
I hope I’m wrong.
Interestingly, Web3 Foundation (Polkadot etc.) announced (https://medium.com/web3foundation/web-3-multi-sig-wallet-update-245d30df0fb3) that the lost funds "won't affect project development". Which calls for a question: if you lost this money that you apparently don't need for project development, why did you needed to raise it through ICO and why did you need to raise that much?