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A tangent? Sure, hard forks are possible, but not the ones which are needed. Addresses the red boldface text.
Which tangent? Block rewards wouldn't change for the miners, just transaction fees.
A hard fork would address many so called issues with scale and transactions per second limited by the current 1mb size per block.
Let's take this one step at a time.
1. The block rewards are too high--too much coin is being produced, Bitcoin is unable to maintain price @ 14-15% monetary base inflation.
2. A real currency like USD, with IRL people at the helm, would limit issuance in such times to counter the falling price.
3. BTC can't do it with a hard fork--miners wouldn't mine the fork in which the block rewards are lower--see red text.
4. You posted a fork which does not change the block reward & does nothing to address this issue.
The proposed hard fork is intended to be tested and possibly released within the year, before the year 2016 block halving, in which the block reward would be 12.5 BTC instead of the "too high" 25 BTC.
It's been done twice before in 2010 and 2013, why can't these same miners adjust to the new chain once again?
The new fork isn't supposed to change the block reward, there's nothing wrong with the original protocol that halves the block reward every 4 years.
The new fork addresses the issue of scale and transactions per second, which at 1MB and 7TPS isn't enough with continued growth.
Some other changes that are being tested and planned with the proposal:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hardfork_Wishlist
