I think the real problem here is crowdfunding.
When you go into buisness with investors, you are held responsible for keeping to the buisness plan, to deliver what was promised and have to show, regularly, what you are up to and how much money has been spent and on what.
When you go into buisness with crowdfunding, you dont really have anyone to report to. As long as you are working on the product and do an update now and then, you can claim you are doing your job. Noone has the right (to my knowledge) to see your book, to demand information about spending or such.
CR got a ton of money, has put together some sort of community of development studios and claims they are making progress. This seems to be a new approach to developing a huge game, and an approach that some claim will never work/is not cost-effective. I have never been in the game development world, but it seems to me that they are missing self-imposed deadline after deadline. They have changed the original specs of just what the game is supposed to be (but seem to allow refunds to backers who dont want to be part of this new game) and changed the TOS from a 12 to 18 month refund and disclosing of accounting if they fail to deliver.
His poorly formulated response letter (I am conservative, the president of a company should not be allowed to post something like that....ever. Huge PR department fail, they should have told him to STFU and let them formulate the repsonse, its their JOB) gives the impression of "hey! dont badmouth our product, if we cant sell ships we wont be alble to finish the game! If we have to lay off people its now YOUR fault!", something that sets off some alarms with me.
On the other hand.... DS.... jesus. Yeah he has been working on games since forever, I will give him that. On the other hand he, to my knowledge, has never managed a large project. Of course he has the right to ask questions, anyone has, but looking at his trackrecord and his confrontational style of asking those questions are embarrassing. If he is allowed to be the spokesperson of the people unhappy with the game, they are not doing themselves any favours.
If someone with a good standing in the gaming community would have calmly and directly asked the questions instead, I think we would all have been in a better situation. Now the conflict is in full trench-warfare mode with neither side being able to take a reasonable step back and judge the situation.