it was a crass attempt at "taking over" when BCH was first launched and seems to be getting worse.
can you elaborate?
NOTE: "Windows" locations used for convenience
Instead of installing to a "unique" location and using a "unique" data directory location (for example C:\Program Files\BitcoinABC and C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\BitcoinABC) like all the other "QT" clones do... The BitcoinCash devs deliberately setup the installers for Bitcoin ABC to install to the same default location that Bitcoin Core uses. Specifically C:\Program Files\Bitcoin and C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin.
The upshot of this, was that any user that wasn't paying attention, and was just clicking "next-next-next" through the installer and during first run, would end up overwriting their Bitcoin Core install with Bitcoin ABC... furthermore, Bitcoin ABC would "take over" the data directory (ie. Blocks and Chainstate folders etc)... which would effectively "corrupt" the blocks folder making it no longer work with Bitcoin Core... as "invalid" blocks (as far as BTC is concerned) were being added into Blocks folder etc.
The Bitcoin Cash camp were trying to be "THE" Bitcoin... instead of accepting their fate as an "altcoin". I suspect this was also why they only added "replay protection" at the 11th hour when it was obvious they were not going to succeed usurping Bitcoin.
yes, imo, this would be the much simpler way to do it. if you try to work with a truncated chain terminating at the 8/1/17 fork date like the one HCP is recommending, this means that you have to go back and manually dig out every BTC tx you made when clearing/moving your BTC to Trezor and then construct separate BCH tx's using the same UTXO's in a like for like tx repeat if you will. this is a pain and is the way i'm stuck doing it for now. by my understanding, if you instead sync up an entirely new ABC chain on top of Armory, all your BCH will be on display in the GUI in an up to date fashion thus allowing you to harvest the entire BCH balance in a single tx. at least, that's the way i understand it since i've never done it this way. someone correct me if i'm wrong.
If you work on a truncated chain and
reindex with Bitcoin ABC and then let it finish syncing up to todays date... and then do a "Rebuild and Rescan Databases" in Armory... theoretically, that should really be the same as a complete resync/build using a "from scratch" Bitcoin ABC and Armory... But without needing Bitcoin ABC to sync up to 1st August 2017.
At the end of the day, either way should really work... and depending on your syncing speed, a truncated chain may only save a few hours or a day or two... If speed is not a concern, then a "clean" install is probably less likely to cause you issues