Seems to me that if there are "malicious miners" they might be willing to try to "waste money" (as you called it in another comment) and refuse to shift over to BIP 110. 

You seem to be arguing that few miners would be willing to lose money mining non-BIP 110 blocks after activation BUT also that some significant portion of miners is willing to act maliciously toward BIP 110.

So everyone that doesn't signal readiness is malicious?

The threshold is lower than usual mostly to prevent malicious miners from vetoing the change, which we have seen with past miner-activated softfork attempts. If 55% of the hashpower is ready to change the rules, then there is no reason to wait any longer than that.

dathon_ohm

So the plan is to either convince x% of the miners in an epoch, which is why your threshold is so low, because you know you cannot make this less controversial than it is, and if you don't get that, then an economic nodes majority will kick in and your camp will just fork off on a chaintip with whatever miners you can convince that will then stop cooperating with the majority.

I must admit, we're going to learn a lot from this.

bitcoin

Dathon Ohm releases BIP 110 release candidate 2

Scoresby

So the plan is to either convince x% of the miners in an epoch, which is why your threshold is so low, because you know you cannot make this less controversial than it is, and if you don't get that, then an economic nodes majority will kick in and your camp will just fork off on a chaintip with whatever miners you can convince that will then stop cooperating with the majority.

I must admit, we're going to learn a lot from this.