Exactly.. Regardless whether Bitcoin XT will get enough nodes or miners to fork, or not, is not very important. And sure, Bitcoin will be able to handle this, technically.
What IS important is the very bad influence this all has on the market and trust in Bitcoin by the general audience. Lots of (unnecessary) confusion, panic, harm to Bitcoin's reputation, stalling it's acceptance and growth.
the very bad influence seems already started the price is tanking slowly but inexorably, i'm sure it has to do with the fork and XT, but if true that it will be possible to double spend your coins then in the case that the price will fall to 50% we have still the same value
Could be far below that, because the biggest promise of bitcoin - limited supply - is broken. It means it does not make any sense to use it as a currency or store value, once in a while its price will crash by 50% when core devs disagree with each other
No, it basically killed the whole concept of currency of limited supply, and then we'd back to the fiat world and forget about this programmer's game
Then there is a chance that a new coin which have built-in mechanism to prevent a protocol change will take over. This kind of design should be in there in the first place