Is there a specific reason for the new management that is interesting to the community or just a change in personal interests of those who were formerly involved?
I think "new management" isn't a concept that ever will be part of Ethereum Classic, but I do know that ETCDEV funding issues reported back in December are no longer an issue, with ETC Labs hiring multiple members of that team and also adding new developers.
My two cents - The excitement comes from renewed sources of funding, accelerated development (look at Kotti, OpenRPC, and the Atlantics hardfork), and the ETC Labs accelerator promoting more dapp and tooling development on ETC (check out Ethernode)