>why would the core project care how many times it's forked?
Some changes (eg. to the block reward schedule) are only possible on a hard fork as it makes the main chain incompatible with the pre-fork chain.
That's the philosophical difference between the projects: ETH is not afraid of hard forks and to this date, they have been uncontested. BTC never considers a hard fork and has had at least two major contested ones.
Do you have some technical definition for "contested" or are you using it as a generic term to describe how the forks were perceived by the rest of the community?
Well, of course I forgot the ETC HF, that one was indeed contested. But yeah, generic for a HF out of differences that cannot be reconciled and which leads to a viable new project like BCash, BSV, ETC.
Some changes (eg. to the block reward schedule) are only possible on a hard fork as it makes the main chain incompatible with the pre-fork chain.
That's the philosophical difference between the projects: ETH is not afraid of hard forks and to this date, they have been uncontested. BTC never considers a hard fork and has had at least two major contested ones.