Both Gecko and Webkit seem to have made shifts away from providing a baseline for others to work on. Blink appears to be talking as if they're going in the other direction, and I can see how that would fit with Google's corporate goals, though it's not 100% clear what the truth is as it would appear that Blink won't actually be useful without some parts of the wider Chromium project.

Certainly Opera chose Chromium/V8/Blink rather than whatever other alternatives were available, and I can't see that as a bad decision for them.