It's possible gmaxwell has had enough abuse. Apparently he gave up commit access to the bitcoin github. I saw his last post was in this thread a few days ago.
I've found the abuse the Core devs and BlockStream to terrible. I wouldn't blame any of them for choosing to walk away. On certain (unimportant) forums there's some celebration of the idea that gmaxwell may be walking away. Reading it, I have to say that I would walk away from a community with so many evil people. Frankly, I don't want to be in a "community" with people like that either. If there were a way to boot all of them out and keep gmaxwell, I'd prefer that. If they'd just fork off and leave the rest of us with Bitcoin, things would probably be fine (after a shaking out period). Instead they seem intent on "occupying" Bitcoin.
I'm sure gmaxwell knows he has a lot of supporters in the Bitcoin community. That wouldn't change if he decided to leave. I think most people would understand.
This is very bad, bitcoin is created to prevent such kind of political disasters but unfortunately because core devs holds too much political power in deciding bitcoin's direction, the same thing happened exactly as a political fight in large enterprises: A faction with enough political expertise can use very ugly skill to make their opponents give up. In fact these core devs are the biggest target that can be compromised and the single point of failure of bitcoin, we should limit as much as possible the power from them but curretly there is no mechanism
Now only Wladimir is holding ground, he will be the next target to be compromised. I think the worst case scenario is that no consensus at all will be reached among core devs and bitcoin keeps as it is today forever, all the scaling solutions goes to offchain but that does not really matter for most of the IT illiterate people
There is a mechanism in place to limit the power of developers, the governance mechanism of Bitcoin allows for this by having multiple alternative implementations and the ability to hard fork. We are now going through the process of developing the understanding and ecosystem to further allow this. I believe this is a necessary part of the evolution and growth of the protocol as a whole.