0.8 was winning, 0.7 wouldn't have stuck around for long.  It'd have been a race for the 0.7 upgrade exits.

so what was wrong with that, miners would have done automatically, due to money involved , rest don't care much

This is the most concerning thing about the fork.

And who will force the miners to stay in the highjacked pools?

What if the hijackers replace the blockchain with the fake one? All users will find their wallet empty , the hijackers' wallet  full of coins.

To avoid this kind of disaster,  users need re-gathering with new version of software and the old blockchain.
So it comes the initial question:  the BTC community actually need a government to tell users what to do finally.  

0.8 had all along been saying, over and over, as part of its response to any RPC command, not to use it for mining nor for commerce.

So hey, its not like its users hadn't been warned, constantly, nagged even.

But the 0.7 GUI users types aren't used to "oh gosh looks like upgrading time has come" messages being of a "upgrade right this second or the sky will fall" urgency.

So on balance, it maybe makes sense to prove to the 0.8 users that the nagging was there for a reason instead of freaking out all the drones who like their shiny GUI to be patient and nice about asking them to please someday think about maybe upgrading sometime, maybe even sometime relatively soon, if that isn't too inconvenient, thank you kindly.

-MarkM-
 

Is litecoin not open source? Can you point me at more information on this if so?

@hdcafe

It's all dependent on the miners who provide the majority of the hashing power. Unless you're implying that the they would follow orders from a pool admin without a legitamate reason.

You'd have to hijack the entire dev team because they check each other's work.

You mean, if 0.8 shows _A_ problem... the problem in this case, was pre 0.8......unless you count that pesky little issue that it tends to reject and fork on valid blocks... such a little issue, barely worth mentioning, really...

-- Smoov