to me this looks more like a desperate attempt to make a short term profit out of thin air. possibly to cover some losses (dare i say the cost of spam attacks). or even to start selling some mining equipment to new miners since the new chain may have lower hashrate and a lower difficulty with one of their pulls on github.
otherwise anybody in this world knows very well that when you fork like this with little support your chain is doomed for a thousand different reasons. and we can see price of it is falling already and the "airdrop tokens" are not released yet!
All great points you have there, you have a good head on your shoulders @chris77d you might want to make your own article addressing some of the same?
For me, I am going to abandon the whole BlockChain mess completely until after everything is done and has had time to settle. Then after careful scrutiny I will step back in very cautiously, checking for traps and distractions which might try to rip a person off.