There's two issues with your analysis, a minor one and a major one. The minor one is that you shouldn't use the base rate for depression, because "incidence of depression among men with a horrible ex-wife and a complicated child situation" is way higher than 10%.
But the major one is that you're calculating the probability of one particular set of events causing a person to be too busy to work, and using it to judge the overall probability of them being unable to work. That's not valid - if I flip a coin 10 times, any particular sequence I get will be 1/1024 unlikely, but the chance I get some sequence is probability ~1. Series of events that mess up someone's life happen quite often - to estimate how often, you'd have to sum over all possible such events, which you haven't done.
Or, from a Bayesian point of view: to judge how likely a person is lying based on them saying A happened to them, you need to know not just how likely A is, but also how likely they are to lie that specifically-A happened if it didn't. The latter is also unlikely, so the number you got is much less evidence than it seems.
Men with a difficult ex-wife and child situation are more prone to depression, so yeah, there probably is a higher rate than the standard 10%. However, that data was the lowest-impacting factor in the overall final calculation. Even if we assume a 25% rate, the chances of all these events happening to the same developer one after another would still be extremely low.
It’s true that any particular coin sequence is unlikely, but that example is flawed. We are not dealing with the same binary event repeating over and over, but rather a constantly changing series of life events. Coin flips are random, whereas recurring excuses can be intentional. If someone experiences multiple low-probability events in quick succession, it’s reasonable to question whether there’s another explanation. A binary coin flip has never been the best analogy for a pattern of real-life events.
If we’re applying Bayesian reasoning, we should consider not only how likely the events are to happen but also how likely someone is to lie about them. That’s correct, but you don’t mention how repeated excuses increase the probability of deception. If someone has a history of sudden misfortunes every time a deadline approaches, skepticism is justified, especially when postponements have been happening for nearly nine months
My point is that these unlikely events form a suspicious pattern, increasing the significance of multiple improbable things happening in one situation. When rare events keep stacking up without solid evidence, doubt is natural. When we see repeated patterns of delays, each with a completely different justification, from someone with a long history of doing this, it raises red flags. Let me elaborate:
- Claiming the work was actually done so they could pay him safely. He still, yet again, failed to deliver.
- Promising monthly updates for years, and despite supposedly preparing v0.14, v0.15, v0.99 in advance to bait people
- Deleting posts where he claimed to be working 12 hours a day, seven days a week. (I can even find the screenshots)
- Threatening patrons that his ex would run away with the kids if he dropped below a certain threshold. And then, after years, we find out they’re actually living together.
What Abelius kept saying for years was the, working 360 hours a month. Then he says he doesn't work on Sundays because it's his precious time with his daughters.
That the update is done. But magically, he can't "finish" it for the next half a year.
Many people still keep falling for him and defending crap like "quality takes time". When he isn't even making some next-gen, out-of-this-world game with super-high graphics (which aren’t even made by him) or some futuristic tech like NPCs reacting to every single thing the player does or says. Nay. He makes just an ordinary hentai game with art that has some charm to it. The characters aren’t even voiced. There’s no real quality, no real effort, not even some futuristic crazy tech. His gameplay is as basic as it can get. Dialogues are normal. He even bragged about using AI to help him write, he even proudly admitted of using playmate to do most of the coding. So, what does he doe exactly? Apart from taling money?
He got kicked out of a LoK because he didn’t want to share money with more members to speed up development and instead went with, “I can do everything, so give me the majority of the money"
And Abelius gets away with it all only because people keep supporting him. He earns enough to make a living, so he can keep doing this shit. It's super effective, and other devs seeing it will follow in his footsteps because, yet again, people support such behavior and let it happen.
He might have depression, especially with F95 treating him like shit. His ex might have cancer, too, but the chances of everything being true are zero, not because of probability, but because the things he says contradict any logic (And statistical evidence)