I don't know of a single responsible bitcoin developer that wouldn't prefer using soft-forks to hard-forks. Bitcoin has had hard-forks in the past, but they have been done in response to a specific issue, and were done very quickly. What's most important, everyone agreed that the hard-fork had to be done.
The current attempt by Coinbase to force a contentious hard-fork is dangerous. There are many people that even question its requirement, let alone whether it can be done safely.
I'm not saying it's not going to happen, but it isn't going to be done quickly, and if it is finally going to happen, it'll be managed by the core developers.
I couldn't care less about Pao. I think the attitude and actions of Ohanian (who is, after all, the person who fired Taylor) has been pretty much the antithesis of helpful during this debacle.