But when we see them dumping their rendering engine developers instead of setting them out to do this
They didn't. Hardly any engine developers were let go. Of the 90 people who left or were fired in total (out of about a thousand employees), less than half were engineers. Engineers include testers and developers, so in reality maybe 20 or so developers out of several hundred actually left.
In fact, I read a while ago that Opera was one of the main contributors to Blink. How were they going to do that if they fired all engine developers? Obviously, they did not fire all of them. They fired maybe a fraction of them, if any.
we know that they have cash-flow issues, and apparently they're going to follow the death-march pattern that so many managers seem to choose when faced with such problems.
Whatever gave you that idea? Opera has been constantly been making record profits since a while before they dumped Presto. They are making money, and are growing fast.
Where are you getting your info from anyway? The Onion?