I don't believe that's it, I believe they just lost the drive to do any work.
What they should do is get the community itself involved to help out. I am sure we got some good coders around. I understand there might be a lack of trust but ultimately the community is the one that the forum is for.
My advise is that the forums platform be upgraded to something like ZendForo. ZendForo was built by previous employees of VBulleting (The current forums on this site). ZendForo is light years ahead of this forums and there is huge community involvement and updates all the time, including social media like engagements with forums members.
I actually used to run dreamact.com from back in the day, we lost the domain due to lack of diligence from the owner of the domain.. I asked him to renew it.. he didn't and the domain got lost. I had previously renewed it for him.
I did actually referred about 600 new members to this site. (We would get huge traffic at DA.com) - it used to be reflected in my user info on here, but is not anymore.