So where did the payments in January/February come from? Certainly not from mining?

Of course they ran a ponzi for a couple of months, stop splitting hair. They paid customers' money back to them. It's irrelevant that they weren't signing up any new ones IN THAT PERIOD, if anything that just hastened the collapse. Don't forget that mining ponzis are not your classical investment ponzis - you don't have to pay back 120% or whatever, you can slowly bleed the suckers by paying back 90% of the initial investment and everyone will be happy - hey, it's mining, sometimes you don't get 100%+ ROI.

Now whether you want to hope they will rise from the dead and pay everyone back - that's another story. I hope for that too, I have a couple of BTC invested there unfortunately. I got paid back for the Prisma fiasco, which also looked quite hopeless but still far from this clusterfuck.