I am very worried that this is Bitmain setting us up for catastrophe next month. What if they drove up difficulty, knowing that they can easily control a majority of the hash rate, making the likelihood of chain death on the legacy chain higher given how difficult it will be to find blocks?

We could even take the conspiracy a step further. What if the plan is to drive difficulty up on both the legacy and 2x chains, only to withdraw hash power from both chains and point it at Bitcoin Cash? Surely it would look like an attack by Bitmain, but they've already been pretty open about their preference for BCH over BTC, and they might not have to 51% attack either chain if difficulty is high enough. This would force users of both chains to contemplate a hard fork of the POW/difficulty algo, or otherwise migrate to Bitcoin Cash.