To the "what constitutes abandoned?" question, I want to make a note:
The vast, VAST majority of abandoned games are straightforward; the dev stopped communicating, stopped updating, to all appearances has stopped working on the project. Which is fine, they've got one life to live. The abandoned tag isn't an admonishment to their work so much as an acknowledgement there won't be more.
Then there's a tiny sliver who are confidence men, stringing along their dupes, who actually have more in common with the devs that do release content, but at a pace that's disproportionately slow but they take steps to obfuscate. These are the ones who provoke severe bad vibes and get all the attention, when they really should just be ignored outside of warning people off from them. And when some people see one bad actor, they start looking for more, often in the wrong places.
None of this has much to do with LomL, for the simple fact that the dev communicates on a regular basis with his community, and is open about how long it's taking.