I think it didn't catch on at start because no work on announcement (update of the first post, website...) and less than 6 months between the launch of the coin and your disappearance during more than a year without any news.
So your message sounds like "guys, make my job, invest, and I withdraw profits"
It seems you've made up your mind about what happened, but I can tell you how it went on our side. We put months of research and work into the development and wrote a white paper presenting the technology. We were never interested in "make my job, invest, and i withdraw profits", as a matter of fact, we couldn't care less if it ever hit an exchange. The community asked for that. Altcoin pump and dumps are pennies compared to what we actually make, so even though it's a common perception of altcoin developers, anyone able to develop an innovative technology on top of an existing cryptocurrency infrastructure likely thinks differently. Unless you're ethereum, it's probably always a net loss given the opportunity cost. If genuine curiosity and good will was not involved, a clone coin would always be the way to go.
It's true that we more or less threw the technology over the wall to see what people would do with it, but it's not true that we didn't make updates and stick around for many months sinking even more time in, working on pool support (that no one setup, although people requested the work), prototyping GPU support (and finding it not possible on all N-factors, at least with the hardware that we had on hand), re-writing the difficulty re-target after studying how it was working in practice, etc. I realize you couldn't have been around in the first few months because we updated the first post frequently back then. I personally wanted to see how the community would react to it because at the time, simple clone coins were way more popular and pump and dumps were rampant. I didn't want to be a part of that, so Aptcoin was the result. What I saw is that communities appeared way more interested in pump and dumps and profit opportunities than anything else. That's what it looked like to me anyway and it was very unmotivating. As a matter of fact, it made me sick and I nearly stopped following altcoins all together. Our team long since fell apart too, which was another reason to step away from the project.
So does this mean, I don't believe in the technology or this coin? Of course not, but cryptocurrency is only as useful as a community makes it. And that's what we lacked. I didn't ask the community for anything, but on the flip side, I wasn't going to keep investing time into this project if nothing was happening either. That's just common sense. It's open source and anyone can use it or build on it too.
Long story short, I'm kind of surprised people are still here, and that's what makes me want to continue working on this.
I like the website and the explorer is great. A faucet would also be a welcome addition. I'm still not interested in an exchange personally for various reasons. There are many ways to use cryptos without simply trading them in a zero sum game. Liquidity is arguably nice, but it's not a priority or interest of mine.
If I could make one suggestion, I'd like to see a link to the whitepaper from the website, but since this is volunteer based, don't feel obligated to do that.
