All this is face saving tactics to throw something in the market time to time to prolong the project as long as people stop following by themselves. They started a project which can't be delivered by their team. They are enjoying meetings and meetups to catch new idea probably to have some new project in future under new name. This is how business of some groups work.
They actually are intentionally killing the community too

(This is also common for scammy projects) So there will be less people to complain... But I will be following them forever, I remember a lot of unpleasant details...