The only effective way to create a contentious fork on a DPOS chain is to replicate everything except the stake that is opposed to the new version of the software (if you want to preserve the history of the old chain).
But they did replicate the stake. They then proceeded to transfer it. That is the problem at hand. It was not an airdrop. Everyone's stake was copied, and the users who were blacklisted had their stake transferred out of their account without consent. That is by no means an air drop (which they have been calling it). At the very least, they were deceitful in calling it an airdrop. Some have even claimed that it is theft.
Hmm. But it sounds like the fork was created and the stake was transferred simultaneously. There was no period of time where you could have submitted a transaction to move your HIVE and not your STEEM.
Also the intent of the fork to transfer stake from certain accounts to @steem.dao was clearly announced prior to the chain's creation.
But there was no airdrop. They claim that every account was zeroed out, and then airdropped new currency. None of the accounts were zeroed out. The excluded accounts' stake was transferred. It's not that we were excluded from an airdrop, it is that we were the only one's who had their stake removed.
I agree that the term "airdrop" is a bit misleading. Hive was a hardfork that created a new chain where some users had their assets seized and placed in the development fund. How the fork was executed, in terms of blockchain transactions, is mostly an implementation detail.
This is not dissimilar to the Ethereum hardfork away from Ethereum Classic. A large portion of stakeholders decided they wanted to erase the assets of the DAO attacker and created a hard fork to do so.