You're answering your own question there...

The support is the community, the community is keeping this alive, the community stepped in to keep the intended purposes and promises alive (CPU favoured, longevity and stable/slow emission). The entire fork on algo was made because the founder wasn't around, for whatever (private) reason that don't concern us, and GPU mining became a threat and until he rejoins the community is keeping it alive in his intended vision. It's cheap to do, but that entire concept works really well for that very big known one

For that matter, there is no reason to do anything with already mined coins nor trying to take things away just because they're not here. The intend was to create a long term community supported chain with CPU favoured (if not solely) emission for a more equal and fair minable coin for all to be able to join in. It's not supposed to be easy to mine and so far the total 57k coins over the past year plus is only a fraction. There is still plenty of time till the next halving, so the 'rich list' of people mining this for the past year is small. For that matter, it's a lot easier to buy up on the exchange and take a quick gamble with that...

Most of the other projects with similar technology don't persist nor pay from their own pockets to keep things going, so from that perspective the pot-commitment is high and ensures at least the 'whales' will keep it active as no gain can be had until the buy support is larger than the supply side.