You have to look at their behavior and communications over time and beyond their website
Some of the community wants to aggressively replace ICANN, that is the context, not changing how DNS works.
https://github.com/handshake-org/hs-names/issues/6#issuecomm...
This is the flaw, being an uncooperative community member in the DNS ecosystem
"Collision" is used 26 times, mainly referring to name collisions between different root zone domains or to the ICANN NCAP project (Name Collision Analysis Project).
"Collision Course" is used only once, by a contributor who was not part of the original Handshake team but joined and became a major contributor later.
Hardly representative of the entire community, and definitely not of the founding team.
As to being adversarial... ICANN was allocated 1.2% of the total HNS supply, and all existing TLD owners (at the time of the snapshot) can claim their TLDs on chain. The icann allocation is 5.8% of the current circulating supply.
i suppose there could have been a way to give ICANN a blank check to modify the handshake namespace in perpetuity, but i suspect that might either be technically unworkable or just made the whole venture pointless.