If it's not maintained by the authors or a designated team but is instead left in the wild, whose to say that whoever picks it up first and launches a mainnet will even honor the original donators and genesis block?

Couldn't they just launch a mainnet with their own genesis and sell the coins again? And it sucks but if they are the first to launch... well, they got there first with free work.

I don't like how this could end up. You have every reason to be pessimistic.