Dogecoin isn't abandoned, however there aren't many development activity on popular open-source DOGE software (such as Dogtecoin Core) and the community generally don't care about it.
Tomayto, tomahto. 
Maybe it's because Dogecoin DNS seed isn't reliable. I would try add node from public list such as http://thenodeslist.com/nodes/dogecoin.htm and https://opreturn.net/dogecoin/node/ even though few of them might be spy node.
I had tried all of them recently when Doge was doing its ATH pumps, but I never achieved to run my Dogecoin client. I may had made around 30-50 outgoing connections in which only 3-5 of them were sharing with me blocks. I just wanted a wallet, but I never accomplished to run Multidoge and due to my node's failure of syncing I had to install a closed-source wallet. Chose Exodus from the reviews; I didn't want to sell a significant amount of DOGE anyways.