So it's possible that the fork will get delayed and will not be ready on the 25th of October?
Yes, it's possible for further delays to happen.
Whether this affects the actual forking point, or just the release to the public, doesn't seem decided yet.
E.g. they could still fork at the 25th, premine empty blocks for a while without replay protection, and start transactions on the new network once the protection has been merged.
Also, seems reasonable to put an announcement on hold until these things are all cleared up, besides it's probably going to be very similar to what happened with the previous fork.
To be honest, things are pretty different.
BCH had a clear forking date a long time prior to the fork, it has working replay protection, and the network was open from the beginning for both users and miners.
Kinda silly though that you guys have to do all that additional programming
It's one of the things taken into consideration, the cost/benefit factor.
if this was a one time thing, okay... But how many of these forks will we see after this?
Maybe a lot. Maybe just a few. I'd seriously doubt that's going to be the last one.
Imo this depends on how Gold gets treated on the markets.
If gold dies down quickly and fails to get market support, that might deter future forking attempts.
If it however maintains itself and manages to keep some value, who can tell...
In the next time, we'll possibly see another split very soon between legacy bitcoin and segwit2x bitcoin (currently being handled as BT2).
That is, if 2x still intends to proceed with their hardfork to 2MB blocks in November, despite the vocal protests from the community.