Wasn't the XT hard fork proposed as a last resort, should the bitcoin-core maintainers simply refuse to lift the 1Mb limit? No one wants to go that route. An alternate hard-fork proposal like BIP100 that gets consensus, or a modified version of gavin's that ups the limit to 8Mb instead of 20Mb, or hell even some major changes to the non-consunsus code to make it adequately handle the situation when blocks fill up, and allow wallet software to continue working with a send-and-forget use pattern, any of these would be enough to avoid the need for an XT only hard-fork.

So far BIP100 is the only one that seems to actually be getting any sort of momentum toward consensus, and it was proposed... 2 days ago? When the XT fork was proposed as a last resort, it was when the opponents were (to my understanding) suggesting we just let blocks fill up, and hopefully things would just work out on their own.