They had a problem, they asked the community how they would like it dealt with, and acted accordingly.
Saying the founders were losing too much money so they hard forked it is a gross misrepresentation of the reality. It's like a Fox News representation of what actually happened.
"The Contract is the Code, and the Code is the Contract."
It was a programmers no-man's land where anyone could stake a claim, and start doing cool stuff. And if you screwed up, it was your fault. Nobody else's. And you had to watch out, because it was easy to lose money into nothingness (yeah, BTC had checksums, Eth didnt - another point of amateur hour).
Until the DAO.
When that happened, I think $150m of Eth went into it. Massive amounts. The idea was to have a distributed living self-autonomous company. And, by the older ideals, lots of someones didn't do their homework. Or they did and it was intentional. Regardless, the "completely innocent magnanimous leaders of Ethereum" decided to force a Blockchain split, and rewind it all. Of course, Something like 2/3's of the total amount was owned by Ethdevs. Surprised? Nope.
Bitcoin? Sure, I'll play. But Ethereum has proved that if you are in the special class of people (Creators with loads of money lost), you don't matter. Nor do the ideas of what they were supposedly founded with.
Source?
Regardless, the very people who build the protocol, application stack, and seed blockchain machines were also the ones who had massive stockpiles of eth from the auction... You do remember the auction, right?
They had absolute fiduciary reason to undo their losses.
Edit: And in all honesty, this would be compute-expensive, but the nature of the blockchain would be able to tell how much ethcoin came from before the auction rather easily. After all, a blockchain is just a append-only distributed ledger. Well, we did know the transactions, but you'd likely have to go to Ethereum Classic and replay what addresses put money in.
Let me guess, you don't have the logs. "I was in the irc room at the time" yeah okay that's credible. This is just hearsay FUD.
I believed that Ethereum initially had an interesting idea. I thought their system had little rigor in the way Bitcoin does... but I'm willing to look over pre-alpha stuff for the underlying concepts.
Tl;Dr. Showed up on top of HN. Greatly interested in the concept of compute-blockchain, but dissuaded of Ethereum specifically of company policy/choices.