Since he didn't take the money and run that not the issue here.
The issue as I see it, that he has his voice, his style, and it rubs many the wrong way including members of this forum. That more than a few folks are using what happen during the kickstarter to justify their dislike.
I liked his blog, it was one of my regular RSS feeds, before Google killed Reader. He doesn't owe me anything, and I don't hold any particular animus toward him today. I just believe people should be warned. Crowd-funding works because it's based on trust. It's not a realm where legal sanctions are practical, so reputation is the enforcement mechanism that prevents the field from being overwhelmed by bad actors. That's why we as a community have a responsibility to identify them.
And he owed the backers a product, and then he just vanished off the internet because it got too difficult, forsaking his responsibilities. That's clearly taking the money and running. True, Autarch did get him to sign over the IP and some of the money, but everything I've seen, including your link, suggests he didn't initiate it. He ran from his backers, until his partner went looking for him, at which point he handed over the keys. He also handed over some of the money, but it's still completely unclear how much money. You made one statement that he basically returned everything, but that's at odds with the statement from Autarch you linked.
I can understand why he did it. As I've said before, managing a self-publishing project in the public eye from start to end is tough. A lot of people, even those with extensive credits for writing in the field, have no idea how much work there is when they're going it alone. Even those with a lot of self-publishing experience can find it difficult to scale up or deal with the additional complexities (Skarka's Far West comes to mind). And while the one to many nature of relationships when you're the center of attention may be great when it's going well, when it goes bad it can be hard to deal with the negativity, because it gets amplified by the impersonality and absence of non-verbal feedback, the way posts are always there and don't go away like spoken words, and the sheer number of that "many". When that happens, there's a tendency to withdraw. But it's a bad reflex, from both a practical and a moral standpoint, because going silent is the #1 unforgivable sin, not to mention the creator took money and made a commitment.
I don't think the Kickstarter was a fraud. He did mislead people a bit, but that's common, and all the evidence suggests he fully planned on completing the project. He just got over his head, couldn't deal, and ran away to cower in a corner instead of owning up to his responsibilities to the people who believed in him enough to throw money at his dream project. They're the real victims. That they were made whole by a third party in no way absolves Maliszewski.