Absolutely not surprised. While being sympathetic to ethos of the general torrent community, I don't think that Bittorrent Inc. is one of the good guys. Too closed, too profit oriented, too corporate in their ways.

Bittorrent Inc. is both shady AND dilbert-like in its monetization shenanigans (bitcoin minerware for consumer PCs in 2015, really?). Such feat is not easily achieved. Sometimes I wonder if they are a trojan horse for the distributed content delivery community at large, making dumb moves on purpose to tarnish the torrent protocol brand. Hanlon's razor objection noted.

So I won't be using maelstorm due to trust issues but I would be really interested in alternative clients.