Just two aspects:
The situation with Polaris which start to grow now is a good chance for unknown intusiasts to make their own name on fixing the problem.
Claymore because of popularity may be involved in some political interests about solving (or not solving) that problem. For example AMD release new cards and want people buy it.

Also ETH will go POS in a few months, so hashdrop because of high epoch become irrelevant. Anyway global changes in word of mining are inavoidable.