Thank you for your comment.
I do believe that Poloniex was directly involved in all this story, because as you correctly mentioned without Poloniex ETC would be dead or almost dead now.
Poloniex also made a tricky move adding free ETC to everyone's wallets, actually forcing people to trade - "free money, woo-hoo" :) Without this move a lot less people would have cared.
But if we look deeper into the situation, trying to find party responsible - "hard fork" was the event that literally opened a can of worms. Polloniex just followed