There's a lot of speculation at this point, which I usually avoid unless it's certain, but in this case it seems like there is a high probability that this was their plan all along. I doubt they had a physical contract with @steemit, instead, they broke an unspoken contract by using a massive delegation to pay their team and build a competing platform. That's made a lot of people committed to STEEM pretty upset.
If they had been honest about their intentions, I doubt they would have gotten the huge delegations they did. I believe they knew that so they kept it secret as long as possible to continue milking the rewards pool.
Agreed, they could have done it differently, and we should be upset, and I hope we bounce back even stronger than ever without Dlive and with alternatives and everything. Thanks so much for talking about this. Upvoted.