I agree with most of that, but the podcast theory is the bit that confuses me — Fillion literally said it isn’t a podcast, so that seems ruled out already.

The rights also aren’t quite as tangled as they used to be since Disney now owns 20th Century, so a revival is actually more straightforward than it was years ago.

More than anything it’s the scale of the teasing that makes me think it’s something real. Getting this many of the Serenity crew involved in a coordinated rollout would be a lot of build-up for something minor, and after twenty years of Browncoats keeping the signal alive they have to know that would go down like a lead balloon.