The community ending up split between two chains would be a disaster, imo. It looks bad to outsiders, its very confusing, and it means that people are needlessly duplicating effort instead of working together.
Lets avoid that.
That happened between Ripple and Stellar. It wasn't at all a disaster.
If each chain has a well identifiable brand, people will just perceive SmartCoin/Graphene/CryptonomexCoin as a new currency from the award winning creators of BitShares and learn to like it for its own merits and hate it for its own defaults.
The problem in that partiular case of BitShares is that BitShares always defined itself as a free software project with libertarian leanings so doing a 180 degree turn to become a proprietary project with commercial endeavour is likely to get it red flagged beyond repair in the crypto community. Look at the amount of flak Ripple got for doing things not remotely as controverrsial as what we are discussing now...
I'm actually of the belief that we should have the ability to disagree and fork bitshares so that these chains generally represent the spectrum of philosophical leanings. In fact that is what I loved about the concept of Sharedropping from the very beginning. I actually have expected for a long time that the community and maybe even some of the devs would split off and form different chains, sharedropping a % on BTS/AGS/PTS holders in a way that enables them to have ownership in each chain and the underlying philosophy each one represents.
Then the stakeholders currently here can decide which chains to divest in and which to buy into further. Over time you'd have chains that started out with similar foundational technology but that would compete based on philosophy (communist, capitalist, socialist...etc).
So if you believe that BM and the team are going to do something that is outside of your philosophical comfort zone...or that you think will make the chain value far less...you sell your stake in that chain and buy fully into the one that sharedropped 100% on you and has a development team with a philosophy more in line with your own.
It would be akin to having the ability to easily move from country to country FREELY without having to worry about anything except whether or not you think your original country is worth keeping a second home there...
Some might be uncertain and thus would keep equal stake in all of them thinking "I'm going to play it safe because I want to AT LEAST have a house in these countries in the case all the others are proven to become failed states..."
While others might say "I KNOW this chain represents the philosophy that guarantees value creation and the others will no doubt fail...so I'm selling all my property in those countries and buying a mansion in the country whose driving philosophy most believe in. I will be very very wealthy in this kingdom when I'm proven correct."
In this way the earlier you invest in building the toolkit that changed the crypto world, the better off you are...as a reward for your vision.
I want bitshares to someday have as many forks as bitcoin...why? Because it is superior technology to bitcoin and at the moment we have as many legitimate alt chains as bitcoin is the moment when DPOS as a foundational protocol is accepted by the broader world as the crypto gold standard. The only differences would be slight changes in how consensus is reached (ie--will the roles of delegate, witness, worker...exist separately? Or will they remain combined? Will the dpos chain innovate in ensuring anonymity as a foundational philosophy? ...etc)
The more I think about it, the more I think we should create two separate chains and leave one with the name bts(2.0) and a second one to something else (like graphene)...then let everyone decide where they prefer to stay. At that point it is THEIR decision...not BM's...so they can't complain about because it is their own free will and good decisions that are rewarded.
It would also be a very newsworthy event that we enable EVERYONE to decide where they will participate...and will make many original bitcoin holders wonder why the heck they are constantly buying into new altcoins when they could just join the buy into any of the bitshares-powered iterations.