I think I would have felt better if he had a vendetta. But those concerns were brought up after the XBC ipo, so it's not really surprising. I mean everyone investing in the ipo probably had it in the back of their mind.

Also when you think about it, Poloniex doesn't necessarily matter right now anyway. If a coin isn't doing particularly great on Bittrex, yet still has okay volume, a new exchange won't all of a sudden make things all better. There could be a temporary boost (meaning some folks can dump), but it normally doesn't automatically fix things overall.

More dev activity here would help much more than Poloniex would. If the coin/community improves, the dev could probably buy his way onto mintpal with the ipo money if he wanted to.