I actively entertain the hypothesis that Hearn (and now Andresen to some extent) are associated with the shadowy Conformal entity who has their own clean-slate implementation of the Bitcoin protocol 'btcd'.  For a few months they were pushing pretty hard to have Bitcoin shift over to their implementation with the argument that it is 'better' in some ways (and I personally don't doubt that it is.)  'justusranvier' was most active in pushing it, but he seems to have disappeared from this forum.

If this hypothesis is basically valid then it would make a lot of sense for someone in Hearn's position to try to do as much damage to the 'satoshi-based' protocol support structures as possible on his way out the door.