Who had the most to gain from SGI's excommunication from the Temple?

The bitterness that SGI bears towards the temple has always puzzled me. I started practicing in 2006, so the excommunication was 15 years done and over with - nine years, if you go by the facts (which members rarely do); ikeda was excommed in 1991, but the general membership was not given the boot until 1997. In other words, NS gave members six years to decide between staying with them or affiliating themselves with sgi; actually kind of generous in a way if you think about it.

It seems to me that, other than saving face (not to be underestimated in Japanese culture), the priesthood had very little to gain by cutting sgi loose. I suspect that the lay organization provided most of their income.

On the other hand, ikeda had everything to gain. By separating sg from the temple, he not only secured all those lovely contributions for himself, but was able to grab all of that devotion and power and claim it as his own.

" What I learned ( from the second president Toda ) is how to behave as a monarch. I shall be a man of the greatest power. The Soka Gakkai may be disbanded then. ".( The Gendai = Japanese monthly magazine,July 1970 issue ) http://www.toride.org/eikemondai.html

Ikeda could not possibly have fulfilled that goal while under the priesthood's thumb, and running his own Soka Kingdom was certainly his ultimate goal.

I generally try to avoid information printed by NST, because it makes it too easy for members label it as "temple lies," but I found the attached to be thought provoking. Ikeda had many opportunities to mend fences with them, but one gets the sense that his enormous ego and greed prevented him from doing so. He was removed from the presidency years before - could it have been at that point that the seeds of orchestrating the excom took root? It seems that he was a relatively good boy for a while, but then started going out of his way to piss the priesthood off. If unity was genuinely all that important to him, he could have put the brakes on at any time; instead, he seemed to deliberately goad them.

Of course, this is all pure speculation; I've combed the internet to see if I could find something that might support it, and this is the best I could come up with:

http://www.nst.org/sgi-faqs/the-history-of-the-relationship-between-nichiren-shoshu-and-the-soka-gakkai/4-events-leading-to-excommunication-of-soka-gakkai/

At this point, I have to (once again) reiterate that I have no affiliation with any organization. To the best of my knowledge, I've never even met an NST member.