From my point of view, you were offline because you had personal issues to deal with, and you dealt with that first, and simply resumed the development after that, and I also see no issues with Ernest being the owner because he is the owner and the founder despite the project being open source and sure, contributions had to go through him but that's fine as long as Kbin itself isn't dead, if it was, then asking him to remove that process would be more reasonable to let the rest of the community try to revive the project, but Kbin wasn't dying or so, it was merely paused for a short period of time.
I personally won't be hopping in-between projects like a kangaroo, I am invested and am already on Kbin so far, its good to have alternatives generally, but in this case, I personally see no reason to go for Mbin. I also encourage and hope potential future contributors focus on a set of projects and not spread themselves too thin.
We all have a life outside the internet, so pauses or breaks here and there is natural, this is less visible in big tech companies, more visible in small startups/projects in early stages which was really the case with Kbin, so we should be patient, I will be atleast :)
Melroy, if you don't mind me asking, why did you go away from Kbin to start your own? I see nothing wrong with Kbin, ernest seems to be a great hardworking guy, I feel like we are just spreading the already small community too thin, Kbin is already small compared to Lemmy and now only the development has started picking up it's pace back again, another spinoff of Kbin makes no sense to me personally.