it wasn't much of a team split, just the dev team's resident pakistani computer salesman (stqism) embezzled a bunch of money and ran off, as much as I think Tox is untrustworthy and stupid I can say I'm pretty sure nobody else in Tox was involved with this

Thanks for that bit of insight, it is a confusing story especially when I ran into it. I like the UI of Tox, I wish it were truly solid, but I much rather recommend Pidgin with OTR and IRC / Jabber (although Jitsi is decent in this regard too), or Wire / Signal.