[xorcist]

Absolutely, and Bitcoin sort of had too. That knowledge isn't very helpful for managing changes today unfortunately. Today people actually buy stuff for Bitcoin and it's not very helpful to ask all economic activity to cease until a fork has settled down.

None of this is very relevant to the uptake of segwit transactions however, unless as a what-if scenario had segwit been done as a hard fork instead. That was the original intent of the proposal, if I remember correctly, and there was a lot of discussion at the mailing list exactly how this should best be deployed. Looking back at it, it is quite clear it could have been deployed quicker had another mechanism been chosen.

[DennisP]

There's no need for economic activity to cease; hard forks can be very smooth. I agree that segwit should have been a hard fork.