Autograph isn't tainted, just like ZBrush wasn't tainted, but Maxon dropped the name Pixologic and I expect them to drop the name Left Angle. They could easily dump the name Autograph as well though. I guess.
One of Autograph's most recent touted features was the ability to import AE files and replicate whatever was going there in Autograph, barring various plug-ins.
Maxon are heavily invested in AE plug-ins but it wouldn't hurt to make them all Autograph compatible, and to tell some newcomers, yeah you could sub to Adobe if you want, but Autograph (or whatever the new name is) has most of that stuff now, works 100% with our Red Giant and C4D stuff, and you don't need a second subscription, just ours. Would this make them more bucks, or less?
RedGiant already has RedGiant staff working on RedGiant comping plugins, do they need more people doing the same?
The Left Angle guys just spent three years invested in doing something different to AE, rather than just making AE plugins (which would have been easier) in a compositor similar to AE but conceived as fresher and hopefully with a more ambitious road map. Should they now (a) dump all that work getting away from AE and go back to making AE plugins, or (b) keep on trying to do the new stuff they were doing when Maxon bought them. More to the point, which of those two options do you think they want to do?
If Maxon just wanted to buy all the Left Angle staff and have them do Red Giant plugins, there wouldn't have been much need to put out a press release with the word 'Autograph' in the headline, and a big fat screenshot of the Autograph app at the top of the page. So Left Angle has gone the way of the dodo, but I think the chances of Autograph coming back in some fresh rebranded form are a fair bit higher. Possibly the name will change totally, the UI will get the Maxon treatment. If the 'something new' is something with a timeline, an object browser, a compositing window, various generators and text tools and so on, it'd be daft to make all that a plug-in inside AE rather than presenting the whole lot, tidied up, as a new app hopefully presenting a competitive alternative.
The few Autograph threads on the AE Reddit page (there were a handful) all said "Please give us an alternative to AE, it's such a crashy POS". Then when I do my annual ritual of checking the official AE forums, the posts there under most updates read "Has this app become even worse? This is the crashiest version in years." There is room for an alternative. McGravran was previously the director of engineering for After Effects, and the Left Angle guys had heavily planned to make a modern AE competitor, and neither of them seem lazy or unambitious. The next 12 months will be interesting.