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.
You're right. You can launch your own coin with the current version of XEL code, BUT then:
-you will need to continue development on your own
OR
-you will have to follow XEL's development team in order to keep your coin up to the date with XEL, but what would be your value proposal then?
It's similar to RISE and LISK, where RISE team initially followed LISK very closely, but then they decided to start their own code from scratch.
In this case however, I believe XEL will be better than its clones :-)