The big players of ethereum don't need to mine, they bought the coin when it was cheap and have millions now.  The softfork also will not pass because they discovered a vulnerability in the code that is suppose to cause problems for the miners and possibly blockchain but im not 100% on that.  The big pools will accept a fork once something stable is proposed in hopes that it will be bullish to the market and raise the price.

The Ethereum devs really are screwing up big time.  How they can propose a fork that has further problems is beyond me unless they want to crash the market.