I've followed some of the development discussion and they have a good team actively working on the problems.

I am guessing we are seeing one or several large investors funding further development through guise of this coin.  They had already received millions to start development and probably had agreed to appropriating a certain % of ETH when it was released.  However, additional funding was probably done this way (one would only have to inspect the blockchain) to allow for additional media attention.  Transactions involving millions of dollars is not really news.  However, conducting a transaction of this size via BTC would definitely be news and bring additional awareness of Ethereum to public.  

People seeing transactions size and frequency increasing in BTC is good for everyone, especially storage drive manufacturers.