While i'm confident that Atom will not "die" any time soon, if MS pulls the team that's currently working on new features and reassigns them, then at best it's

While i'm confident that Atom will not "die" any time soon, if MS pulls the team that's currently working on new features and reassigns them, then at best it's going to be a large blow to the project. A fork won't have the same team working on it, a fork won't have the same domain knowledge over the internals, a fork won't have the roadmap or what was currently planned and how to do it, a fork won't have the same unified development effort (if MS "kills" atom, FB won't be the only one picking it up, there will absolutely be others that won't like the direction FB is taking, and now you don't just have Atom, you have AtomFB, Atom2, NuAtom, etc...) It won't be that big of a deal at the end of the day (it's not like there is a shortage of competition in this area), but I would be much more on-board with this if MS handles Atom well.