2. The strength of the attack. The first ddos strike was handled by cloudflare no problem while this one brought the entire isp down. The site was moved to a data center that specializes in handling ddos and yet still is being taken down/vulnerable. Thats a ton of resources/infected computers/MONEY. this points to government interference, maybe not our normal villains the US govt but say, the government of cyprus.
I believe the attacker is most probably the same person or people or entities who were previously attacking other BTC sites including Dragon's Tale. The attacks have consistently been getting stronger, perhaps as the attacker gains more experience or perhaps as they simply harvest more zombies for their botnet.
I don't really know the technical details of the DDoS, so can't say if the technique is getting better or just the volume. I hope BTC sites are sharing information on this, because if one site gets hardened to the point the DDoS is not working on that site any more, we will very likely see the attacker move on to other sites.
It may be the only long-term solution to these attacks is going to be finding out who is doing them and going after them personally. You can't really stop a botnet without chopping off the head.