This is how I view EIGEN and why I am actually happy with the airdrop.

Strategist | Community Manager at 
Bankless | Bullish on the crypto technology and the opportunities it is creating.

I somewhat disagree with the second part. Forking tokens aren't new, the EIGEN whitepaper discusses Augur's REP, which is 8y old.

All of the forking happens at the bEIGEN level, so even if forking was a total unknown space, EIGEN is fully isolated from the mechanism.

Non-transferability is a pure market making move.

Building pods.media to help you collect conversations.

On the non-transferability note, I think that they just want to give people time to learn about the mechanism. If you allow trading from get-go, just a few people will care about what the token does. 
However, if you unlock options one by one, people has less things to decide about. 
Staking->delegating->trading...