CNET has an article that Opera wants to abandon the Mac platform because of Safari. It sounds like they are just giving up here. A bunch of whiners if you ask me. Their product isn't very good on the mac and people don't use it now either. Maybe if they made a good mac app that is up to par with others (Chimera, Safari, Omniweb) they could compete. It seems like they are just using Apple as a scapegoat for their own problems.
The part that is really crazy is that they have given Apple the offer of their engine to replace kHTML in Safari. Why would Apple do that? They have just made kHTML good why would they switch now. Thats crazy. It seems like they are saying "Apple, pay us and use our product or we're leaving". What a bunch of sore losers.
I read about this on zdnet here:
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-982314.html
I totally agree with you! Mac Opera has always been mediochre at best and the others you mentioned are easily superior. Besides, they never did bring their Mac version up to par with the Windows one anyway, so I really don't know why they are complaining. They should either make something good, settle for mediocrity or get out of Mac browser development altogether.