My take on hostility was that the guy who made the call to switch the domain away from the site did it while the site was live/active, and apparently without settling things with mods+owners in a civil way. There could have been a 'ok guys we all need to start using p.w now and td.w will be switched off shortly' type campaign, and everyone by and large would have been fine with it. No outages, no ruffled feathers.

Interruptions to a live site when the interruption was an explicit choice made by the domain owner, presumably with the full awareness of consequences is not a good act in my view, nor can it reasonably be described as a neutral position.