And with proof of work a lawsuit could force the distributor to change the consensus rule so that a particular transaction is invalid - just as Ethereum did voluntarily with the original DAO.

> You mention “POW forks”, but Bitcoin’s POW has never been hard forked

Instead it’s been soft forked, which turns the consensus rules into a popularity contest. If a soft fork produces two competing branches of the blockchain, old clients will go with whichever branch has more mining power. Which means you open yourself up to interesting attacks like convincing 51% to literally steal the funds of the other 49% (which is much worse than a mere double spend). Or, more realistically, in the case of a contentious soft fork that ends up roughly fifty-fifty, you could ‘just’ end up on a different side of the fork from the people you want to transact with. Either way, soft forks don’t make the downsides of policy changes go away.