The question was more, where is the evidence and what happened, that made you think that DECENT's dev team did a horrible job, concluding there is an increased likelyhood they might just fail the project.
And to answer your question, oh yes for sure they could just give up any time. Companies with thousands of employees had been closed down within a day. That is not an indicator at all. And $5.8 million could be easily spent during the last 3 years.
The initial question was more. Why does the value of the coin drop so hard? And is that an indicator the project is failing? (people who know more about it leave a sinking ship, hence price plummets)
Totally valid question. There are actually answers out there now if you do a little bit of digging.
Looks like I have to do just that. But as "decent" is a quite common search term, would you have a broad direction where to look for those other discussions/articles? bitcointalk was not really revealing either, with the pages I checked up to now. LoL, even honorable witness @pfunk is suggesting to have a merger with STEEM and Decent to leverage on both functionalities. Nice idea :D