The people who are the brains behind the project can always fork. An organization that's turned inward and primarily concerns itself with rules, codes of conduct, procedures, and investigations will always lose to an organization full of people who are passionate about the problem and the code.
The pattern I've seen over and over again is you have a core group of creators who are talented, but prickly or obnoxious in some way. The project creators spend years of their lives building the project and making it successful. Then others come into the project, and use real or imagined personal offenses to boot the creators out of the project. These usurpers don't have talent, but because the project is successful already, the impact of booting the creators doesn't become apparent for a while. The project, however, cut off from its engine, stagnates and dies.
Best example? Apple.
Maybe Appelbaum bucks this trend by not having the talent to balance his flaws. I don't know. But I'm pattern-matching against the phenomenon I described above, and so far, it looks like a perfect match.
Appelbaum had a fair number of commits, 2008-2011. [0] There isn't much recently, and overall one doesn't get the impression that he'll be able to transition from his recent evangelist role to that of a hard-charging developer of his own fork.
