Hmm. But it sounds like the fork was created and the stake was transferred simultaneously. There was no period of time where you could have submitted a transaction to move your HIVE and not your STEEM.
Also the intent of the fork to transfer stake from certain accounts to @steem.dao was clearly announced prior to the chain's creation.
But there was no airdrop. They claim that every account was zeroed out, and then airdropped new currency. None of the accounts were zeroed out. The excluded accounts' stake was transferred. It's not that we were excluded from an airdrop, it is that we were the only one's who had their stake removed.
I agree that the term "airdrop" is a bit misleading. Hive was a hardfork that created a new chain where some users had their assets seized and placed in the development fund. How the fork was executed, in terms of blockchain transactions, is mostly an implementation detail.
This is not dissimilar to the Ethereum hardfork away from Ethereum Classic. A large portion of stakeholders decided they wanted to erase the assets of the DAO attacker and created a hard fork to do so.