It ain’t about stroking the customer. You might know him, they don’t and he could be swanning around in Hawaii for all they know.
Do you thinking taking five seconds to ping a message to the people paying for your little artistic project is to hard? Try backing it like other companies and hope you sell enough to recoup your investment.
Between this and another designer who finds his consumers to much work to bother I can see why a lot of people lose faith in KS. Lucky for me I have the opposite example of a class act, a small publisher who despite some real serious illness kept the lines of communication open and guess what, not a single complaint about the delays from his backers, just gratitude for being open, honest and informative and a project coming out shortly they’re excited about...not writing off.