If it's his site -- if he's paying the hosting and domain registration fees and doing the work -- then he can do whatever he pleases, and others are free to participate or not.
other than 'doing the work', we all agree. Yes, Tim did a lot of the work, but by no means all of it (though he'd have done less work/more fruitful work if he was more trusting that his team knew what they were doing and thus didn't create busy work for himself with arguments about "Town Highways", or duplicate work already done by others). I'm pretty sure better hosting was offered and turned down in the past too. It is his site, and yes, he can do what he wants - thats a key reason why he refused the offer of better hosting, kept everything going through himself, etc.
He, absolutely, doesn't owe the general users anything, but he does owe the people who've put in many hours on to making his site better 5 minutes to post a forum message giving us some sort of information, rather than uncertainty about the project's future.
That the collaborators, if they can, still want to work with Tim, despite himself, shows that we do very much agree with him that the project is his baby. Goodness me, it's March - four months ago in November, we were similarly hopeless and then there was the tiniest couple of flickers of life that means we still haven't given up.