Well, the Ethereun fork itself reveals that there is some recourse.

It may be less attractive recourse than exists with plain contracts for many potential participants, though.

Sort of, but it's also insane. Forking Ethereum because of the DAO hack is a bit like forking the US dollar after the crash of 1929.

Which is just my point. It's not that no means of recourse exists outside the contract code; it's that there exists no option between zero and global thermonuclear war. The broad range of subtleties that contract law has developed to answer complex situations, and the option to exercise judgment in those cases not yet captured by precedent, is completely absent in Ethereum, because the people who designed it saw no reason why any such thing should be needed.

Unfortunately, that they failed to see it doesn't mean it isn't so, and now every new conflict among blockchain participants is an exciting new opportunity to reinvent another piece of several hundred years' worth of too hastily discarded prior art.

We did devalue the dollar against the gold standard significantly in 1934. Not entirely unlike a "fork", since it's a declaration that, whoops, your dollars are now worth 40% less gold than you thought.

In 1931 Britain floated the pound, which arguably the US ought to have done too. Suddenly, your paper is no longer convertible to gold at a fixed rate. That's an even more dramatic change than the Ethereum fork.