I would think that the people throwing thousands of BTC in this have done their own research and reached the conclusion that the dev and the project are legit.
No.. people who do pump operations don't care about fundamentals of a coin. And couldn't probably even understand it - because the asiacoin dev or whoever it was in this thread can't. They just see buzz around a coin and hop in because it's easier to make profit on than on a total stand still coin. They have a lot of BTC not because they invest in fundamentally good coins, they have it because they were lucky to be around on BTC or LTC early days.