well basically you have to throw out proof of work and then it's fine. If that's a philosophical thing then you're constrained to highly inefficient systems that yeah, are designed to fork like you say. But if you're okay with any kind of proof of stake setup, you don't have to consider forks, because you trust your validators.
Ultimately it comes down to what you like about the blockchain chimera. Some people like proof of work for its own sake; they think that's the way forward. Some of us think that public distributed append-only log structures with cryptographically enforced permissioning are super interesting all by themselves, maybe even MORE interesting without proof of work!
Long term I don't think it's going to be any fun until a larger subset of homomorphic computing is cheap enough to run distributed-consensus style. In the meantime all I know is it's a lot more fun once you stop trying to be the source of truth for the universe, and accept proof of stake as a natural compromise necessary to keep playing with our toys w/o burning up.
I'd be happy to share but you'll have to message me. And I'm an idiot.