They even worked with CSW until a few months ago, when he decided he was no longer going to work with anyone in the community, and instead declare new rule changes and a new road map for BCH...
To answer your question, I take ABC seriously because they have a long and consistent history of working with the community to develop protocol changes in a responsible manner.
We will see. This hash power CSW claims to have is still yet to materialize... Is it all currently mining BTC, or is it offline? If it is offline, why? If on BTC, where (what pool, etc)?
it is clear that these guy have developed enough support (both from the community and $) that it would be foolish not to take them and their ideas seriously.
The reason I'm taking them seriously is simply because most others are. Calvin / CSW has been all talk so far - I mean, ffs, BU beat them to even implementing their new ruleset. BUT...
Ignoring all the characters, and looking only at the proposed changes for the upcoming fork, it is difficult for me to make a decision. On the other hand, the changes fit into ABC's detailed...
It all comes down to block size, and the fact that the network and software is not optimized to handle even full 32 MB blocks. This is the bottleneck. See stress tests if you don't believe me.
Lol what? First of all, you need a warehouse full of Antminers to have a chance at mining a block... Raspberry Pis are not the scaling bottleneck... The software is.