If 51% of the miners decide to fork, I think I will follow the majority and support the fork to get back the money from the attacker.
Satoshi had a term for that, he called it attacking the network:
As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network ... - Satoshi Nakamoto (bitcoin.pdf)
So, no, there has been no "hack" or "attack" so far, but Vitalik, Tual, and their cronies are working on one.
Soft forks are 51% attacks. At best, when done for relatively-benign upgrade purposes, they demonstrate a vulnerability of the network and should still raise some level of concern that the developers and miners are able to conspire to pull off a 51% attack. When done transfer control over coins, that is outright theft.
Smooth if forks are authorized by a protocol that was designed in the coin from the start, i.e.
an ability to vote on changes by stake holders for a PoS coin (e.g. DASH), then that appears to not be a 51% attack. But otherwise I agree with you, and when you have the same group of devs from the ICO able to control the politik then they are essentially running the enterprise.
There is a grey area where someone from the outside creates a fork and the users and miners spontaneously decide to switch over to it. This can be argued to be a feature of decentralization and open source, and necessary to correct deficiencies. Yet it is still a 51% attack. If done with proof-of-burn, then it is not a 51% attack.
But your analysis of the issues here seems to be oversimplified because the law interacts with all this to create more complex scenarios. Please read this:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.15271289
