The question is though who will stand the test of time? Looking at BCH it's hard to tell if that was a negative overall at the time because all that happened is people moved into BCH and the price didn't plummet like it was popularly thought, although this seems to fall in the same "category" for reasons to fork as you said it's quite odd that they would bet against themselves, but I don't understand how they could undermine themselves by locking out people who can mine, as anything anti-competitive or wholly exclusive will undermine the very reason for the fork and directly drop the price as the trust in direction has went from smooth sailing to every man for themselves.

I think that their equipment won't suffer as much of in a sales loss and if it does it will be offset by what they are poised to gain should they be majority holders and the currency stabilize relatively to how BCH did when it launched. If the motivations are for long term or short, only time will tell as gniksivart said.

It's a good question, why not PeerCoin or FlorinCoin? To me it's wealth is fluid and how people use it or how they capture it, how they store it is all private preference so what Bitcoin Gold is capitalizing on is the Mainstream, seeking to create their own tributary, and this is probably directly because of the first hardforrk and what hardfork three is going to be will be will be determined on how well the previous two have done and at the current rate we could see that by the end of this year. Wealth comes into the system from the system itself and how well it serves the function, which is exactly what @gniksivart mentioned, if people don't see the value in the fork or it doesn't gain any backing, support, or serve a purpose it will just fall on it's face.
My only contention is this:

Finally, all publicity is good publicity. Drops in price just means the more bitcoin I am able to purchase and part of the reason I'm ramping up my activities here on steemit!

No, bad publicity is not good for the coin, it just means that those not invested already get to jump on board for cheap. A currency is good only if it can hold value, and it's perfect when it's value cannot be manipulated by supply and demand or directly otherwise, and the same for the Store of Value. A good store of value gets better with time, more exclusive and more valuable, this is true for almost all tangible things (minus elements and "money" which every year grown and grow in both supply and their value is manipulated to be wholly 90% or more based on hoarding and hedging by the producers and almost exclusively done as a monopoly over both sectors, elements and money) and a store of value that is at the whim of publicity is a poor one by default, so it's a testament that Bitcoins and Altcoins make headway because they do it by default under a piss poor standard, yet they accomplish the equivalent of fine art.