*It will mitigate legal action
This isn't necessarily true. Forking could actually make it worse.
Right now if there would be any liability, that's over the slock.it team and maybe the curators. Until now, miners and users of Ethereum don't have anything to do with TheDAO mess. A fork not only fails in effectively protecting the slock.it team and curators from liability (there are DAO investors that already lost their investments since they sold their DAO tokens at a lost after the hack), but also would involve miners in this whole mess, since they would be playing a role of judges in the whole case.
*It will protect token sales (for now)
In this point the author of the article tell us again that the fork would keep regulators away. Thus, protecting token sales, but as I commented, the "mitigate legal action" argument is not necessarily true.
Furthermore, token sales are not something new. ETH itself is a token, along with a lot more (BTC, LTC, XRP, DASH, XMR, etc). Cryptocurrency regulation is a general issue not isolated within Ethereum. There are a lot of dubious blockchains collecting money by the sell of their own tokens. So, saving TheDAO investors would be almost meaningless in the eye of regulatory agencies. They would want to write broad laws that apply to crypto-economy in general, not for every blockchain.
I think that is more dangerous this growing conformism that appears to accept by default that regulatory agencies have the right and power to criminalize and prosecute code.
Law is also mutable and a social consensus, and we should push for ethical legislation.
*It will return $150m earmarked for investment in Ethereum projects
Another affirmation that isn't necessarily true. Nothing assures that DAO investors would keep their capital in the ecosystem if they are rescued. I'm sure that many investors would stay, but also many others would leave. Besides the 150$M figure isn't even true anymore since ETH has lost value, and once the DAO ETH can move again could lose even more value since there would be more ETH available in the market. Making this 150$M figure even less relevant.
*It will improve mainstream perception of Ethereum
Again, a bold declaration. Nobody can say for sure what the perception of mainstream perception would be. And I believe that Ethereum is far from mainstream adoption (I mean, even Bitcoin still is), so I'll advocate for addressing current users perceptions instead in speculating about PR outcomes. And is not a secret that many members of the Ethereum community are not so happy about a fork to save DAO investors.
*It will safeguard Casper
I have many concerns with this idea that we must prevent the drained ETH from being in control of the attacker in order to protect the PoS protocol. If we couldn't handle an entity controlling 5-15% of all the ETH, then the PoS protocol is too weak and needs to be enhanced to handle entities controlling big chunks of all ETH.
*It will defend innovation
Do we really think is a good idea to give the perception that you can code and promote dApps irresponsibly? And encourage more TheDAO-like disasters?
*It will eliminate distraction
Not really. A mistake in the fork and we could compromise the whole project instead of taking a haircut. There would always be that dirty feeling of having a fork-scar in the network, that maybe could open in any moment.
*Anything about philosophy, principles or immutability. *Moral Hazard
I agree in these two points. The protocol is a consensus, so the protocol is whatever we make it to be.
*It wasn’t theft.
The problem with accepting that the idea that this actually was a theft is that, then we want get the authorities involved? Because if this is theft, then is illegal and it must be enforced, and I thought we wanted to mitigate legal action. I'm sure that I want the less possible regulation.