If the DAO hacker declare that he will not dump his coins, the price of ETC will rise a lot. And he will have enough to support the development.
The DAO hacker does not necessary like the Ethereum or the ETC. He is in for the money. So the price of ETC might crash to zero.
That could be true. We should not pin our hope of the success on the actions of the a single hacker who might not care about other people.
The ETC price is dropped against ETH at the moment. The price has dropped 25% in the last 24 hours. The dump might have started.
I will be sad to see ETC go. The ETC has diverted some hash rate from ETH so I have mined more than expected ETH.
I mined few ETH in the last two days due to the increased difficulty. Maybe the ETC should be kept live for longer.
In several months you will not be able to mine ETH anymore because Vitalik will fork it again and make the switch to Casper POS.
So better for you to start also mining ETC to help secure it so that it will not die.