D3 also failed us. And sadly he's failed himself if he behaved as badly as you said he did. But the site was shit long before it went down, regardless of who's fault it was. (Besides chat, because it was a sewer I'd given up on it for about half a year before committing here, about 2 years before it died.)

M7 lied plenty enough to be forever called a liar. I don't believe his excuses/reasons/story at all - if/when he even bothers to chime in. Does sitting on the info and doing nothing until it's dead and past reviving actually sound like a rational course of action? He had ample time to say something and get something done, even if through the grapevine.

From the beginning the relationship was always clear - D3 was the over-passive gearhead and wanted nothing to do with moderating, while M7 was supposed to be the charismatic leader, but without charisma nor leadership skills. Yet he was the decider ego in charge - deciding to ruin their relationship, do nothing to foster SaidIt site-wide community (subs vibes were started on Reddit), unexplainably vanished for long stretches, and let the forum slide in to festering chaos. Ultimately he's the author of SaidIt's cultural decay.

D3 told M7 give me your site or else, basically holding the site he was entrusted with admin rights to randsom, and M7 said fuck it and pulled it.

This is the first I'm hearing anything like this. Not only does it seem way out of character for d3rr (from what I know of the anonymous ex-admin, now tainted by what you said he did), but he has always been reluctant to do work, be admin, or lead anything. He's passive to the extreme, occasionally passive-aggressive, and it nearly broke him when he was site admin for a bit because magnora7 had abandoned ship. Folks said he did a good job then, though I didn't notice (might have been busy) and don't know what it took to make things run smoothly. With smooth sailing you wouldn't notice the absence of bumps.

M7 didn't pull it if he just let it fall apart. You don't let something rot then tell the community excuses after. That's another example of shit leadership.

M7 had a vision for what he wanted to build.

No.
He did not.
He had dreams. But he refused to make plans. And he refused to include the community.

He dreamed of being a critical thinker. Sometimes he had good ideas. Sometimes he lied about shit.

I dream of being a billionaire. Okay, now what? There are a million steps between a dream and realization. Early on I was pressing to have a roadmap, guides, rules, etc. Document it all in the wiki. I was the one who started codifying stuff in the SaidIt-wiki and on InfoGalactic - thus forcing M7D3 to correct any errors I made.

He wasn't able to get the community behind what he was trying to put his time into, so he stopped putting his time into it.

They started SaidIt and gathered together a community, while refusing to have community input into how things were run because of his ego. As leader it's his responsibility to communicate about all the things - including about when things are going sour and when you're just going to abandon ship. The captain is supposed to be last off.

That's not failing people he owed something to.

False.
He was not SaidIt.
WE ALL were SaidIt.
We all put in our time and effort into it.
We believed in the site that was better than the other options.
We invested our faith.
And he mislead us.
Repeatedly.
Perpetually.

On the other hand, if he were communicating about stuff, perhaps we would understand and not feel so betrayed.
Further, we might have built alternatives long ago.
Maybe he even could have handed over the reigns to a person, a trusted team, or the community (and he could have still remained "owner" and Grand Poobah.)

That's just reasonable time management. It's gotta be give and take.

Time management is good for everyone, but that's not an excuse to not communicate to the people you are "leading".

If he had continued to step up to that plate he would have been the largest time contributor.

This is another straw man. magnora7 chose to take all that weight on his own shoulders himself. He chose that burden. No one forced him to go it alone. He refused to delegate anything until it was far too late. He could have assembled a trusted team. He could have managed the culture and community better. He failed because HE failed.

agenda, or they are going to stop contributing free work to a project. [...] M7 felt extremely backseated.

Yes, cooperation and communication are critical. M7's lack of ability and his ego put himself in that backseat, and D3's equally poor communication was the third leg of that shitty stool.

M7 put in a lot of time.

Yes, many of us did.

What dividend did he get in return?

I will give him great credit for not commercializing the site or selling out, whether he meant to or not.

Did he get the community he was aiming for?

We don't know. What even was his ideal community? He didn't communicate well. He had dreams and aspirations but no plans, no road-maps, no outlines, no concrete goals. I wanted to make stickers and t-shirts to raise funds for hosting, code-bounties, and other projects. I wanted to dev campaigns and media (I still did a lot of PR). We developed wish-lists for features and other stuff. It all seemed like it was for nothing falling on deaf ears. The only thing that was clear is that he was the boss.

And now the boss has taken all our effort and flushed it. If we had a backup of the site we could at least host a searchable frozen archive of it (Wayback is meh).

This has been staying on the front page pretty ok. Discussion matters way more than points here. Unless someone changes their alg options. Which is their call.