As to data points, as someone else said, do your own numbers. Interestingly I've been seeing the prediction for the next diff actually decrease over the past week, not increase. That's been a bit of a surprise.
IMO shouldn't be a surprise if you're really keeping up with the BTC world. Exchange and confirmation issues due to bugs and network attacks, part of why the value has gone down as well.
Now they have betrayed and screwed the people who let their company exist. Hope they can sleep at night.
Just one more reminder of why cryptocurrency movements like this were always designed to be distributed among the people vice gobs of power given to a few.