There's another thing WPEngine would do with that decision though, and that's ruin Matt/Automattic/wordpress.org in the court case (look at who WPE retained as

There's another thing WPEngine would do with that decision though, and that's ruin Matt/Automattic/wordpress.org in the court case (look at who WPE retained as councel, this is not going to be a quick/cheap litigation), and then crush them in the WP hosting market (which arguably they're already doing, which is why Matt's losing his mind). Matt's extortion attempt is because WPEngine is generating a lot of revenue and is valuable enough for PE to notice. He figured he had a decent chance of blackmailing them out of 8% of their revenue to the tune of around 10mil a year. Matt's a deluded and entitled tech nerd cosplaying a mafia mobster. And WPEngine did not blink.