This is the first large occurrence of an issue that has always been known to be possible to people who are reasonably familiar with BitCoin, due inherently to it's design. This could be bad for BitCoin because now a much large portion of BitCoin users/investors are also aware of this risk.

No this is not the first large occurence of this issue.

A fork this big (dozens of blocks covering multiple hours of transaction history) already happened in August 15, 2010, due to an unrelated bug: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu...

Though to be fair, that's like saying something happened in the precambrian age when talking about the average bitcoiner's awareness.

It's not really an inherent design flaw - it's an implementation problem. If everyone was running 0.8 this wouldn't have happened.