Ex-Intel engineer here that worked in R&D- I saw the exact same situations during my time and was one of the reasons I left. The way that teams in the same org with the same goals couldn't or wouldn't work together was incredibly frustrating and such a massive waste of effort. At the time I thought it was a unique situation with our group, but it's sad to see that it's more of a systemic issue that still hasn't been corrected.
There are the opposites as well, I've seen companies that would send you home for even a hint of ego. Essentially "I" was forbidden as it is not in the "TEAM". I much prefer "we" culture than "I" though.
Internally, Bitcoin is undergoing growing pains with regard to scaling and how to manage higher volumes of transactions. The community is fragmented between the competing ideas of how to best achieve higher transaction throughput in the future.
The two "leading" sides of the debate are engaged in a heavy propaganda war with each other and it seems that consensus is going to be tough to come by. These two factions seem to be essentially competing for "control" of the network. To make matters worse, the network has periods of huge transaction backlogs due to blocks being full.
Bitcoin Unlimited is the incarnation of one of the methods to scale the network. Supposedly, there is a large amount of mining power, which is fairly centralized in China, supporting this method.
I can't say much more than this with certainty, as there is a TON of propaganda to sift through. From what I can gather the argument boils down to the BU developers believe their method is an immediate fix to the current scaling problems. Core contends that BU has been spamming the network to create a false sense of urgency, and that the BU solution will allow miners too much control over "Bitcoin" (whatever fork it ends up being) in the future.
WRT to immediate impact, expect huge volatility in the price. Some of the trusted BTC analysts are calling for further, significant shedding of value due to the uncertainty in the future. Additionally, keep your coins in your own wallet. If you're using a web-wallet, there's no telling what you'll end up with if the fork happens unless they've made specific statements regarding their plans. Held in your own wallet, if a fork occurs, you'll hold both BTC (in the classic sense) and the BU-BTC.
Ex-Intel engineer here that worked in R&D- I saw the exact same situations during my time and was one of the reasons I left. The way that teams in the same org with the same goals couldn't or wouldn't work together was incredibly frustrating and such a massive waste of effort. At the time I thought it was a unique situation with our group, but it's sad to see that it's more of a systemic issue that still hasn't been corrected.