I always blamed the witnesses for trying to cut him off before anything had even happened. He mentioned turning STEEM into a TRC-20 token and they freaked out and were worried their drip was going to disappear. So then the thing got really messy and he is really rich and has really rich friends like CZ so it got nasty. I always felt like a lot of stuff that got pointed out was stuff that he did in retaliation from the Witnesses cutting off his stake.

It was a battle for the ages and really no one won in the end.

I would have at least thought the premise that HIVE forked away would have gave it a better case to get on Coinbase or Kraken but it ultimately didn't help. They might not like the HIVE Engine stuff.