I would far prefer them have a temporary outage, than have them take their ball and go home and leave whoever comes next to try to spin something up from scratch over the course of weeks or months. Saying that they resorted to "extortion" or "terrorism" by saying "you're making the work we're volunteering to do, unpaid, harder than it needs to be" is ridiculous, and akin to showing up to a soup kitchen, upending the trash cans all over the floor, and yelling at the volunteers "YOU CHOSE TO DO THIS FOR FREE YOU DON'T GET TO COMPLAIN ABOUT IT, NOW CLEAN IT UP". The fact that we've somehow filled a thread with more than a hundred pages of people incapable of realizing they're not entitled to other people's time and effort is just icing on this entire ridiculous cake.
Could the developers have gotten the same response by posting on the forums without a direct link from their sites? It's impossible to say, now. Maybe other methods would have been sufficiently efficacious, maybe they would not have been. Ultimately, though, 3rd party developers are not and should not be expected to provide free service, both in terms of hosting and development time, for everyone's benefit. If you disagree with their points and think you can write a replacement for their site without needing to involve FDev, the same information they're using is available for you to consume as well; you're welcome to write a replacement and maintain it if you think that their method of calling attention to their potential burnout is so personally offensive. Alternatively, if you think the service they provide is worthless and unnecessary, why do you even care enough to argue here? If someone's providing a useless and unnecessary extension for something, and then complains about that thing being too hard to interface with, the most effective way of getting them to go away is by ignoring them, not arguing with them. (The fact that the developers use the services in question does indicate that it is not, in fact, useless; but that's another topic entirely.)
