No, Dustin, the entire raison d'etre of the XT client was to fork the blockchain, it was hardcoded to activate on January 11th this year, lol.
Like most forks in the blockchain (including from bitcoin the client before it was core), this fork was originally only slated to happen if a certain level of consensus was believed/detected to exist. Later in the game, Hearn got really stupid, but it still wasn't an altcoin until the fork occurred. Don't get me wrong, in my years observing bitcoin, I can tell you that Hearn was amongst the programmers that I expected to be troublesome (Luke-Jr being another prime example, although I don't think anyone considers him too troublesome atm). However, I firmly believe that a proper hardfork is necessary and kicking the can down the road only ups the stakes when it finally comes. When I say I firmly believe a hardfork is necessary, I don't mean big blocks, I mean to resolve the barely acknowledged security flaw that even allowed sepsig to be implemented as a soft fork to begin with. I would have been happy to see sepsig implemented as a hard fork resolving that flaw, and even more thrilled if it also increased or removed the block size limit simultaneously (assuming it could also remove another potential security flaw that larger blocks introduce, but I'm not going to go into more detail here). However, as an outside observer, it certainly looked like the core side struck first in the misinformation war, and once misinformation is released, it can't be contained, so a lot of damage was done by both sides. More importantly, things only got worse from there when it went from a war against the (ultimately malicious) client to a war against anyone who uses any client other than core, and that's when damage to bitcoin started to occur. We may disagree, and my view of this history may not be the one that is ultimately written, but as they say, the history of war is written by the victors. That having been said, now is a time to move onward to much more important battles, those against corporations who want to suppress information about blockchains so that they can sell their closed ones as somehow better.