At the time, I seem to remember them lamenting the game not selling enough to cover the game's huge budget and it just seemed like a pity party. I think
the TA article you mentioned was posted in one of the old iOS mega threads when the game went free. I skimmed the article, and it seemed a lot less entitled than I remember. But at the time, it left me with a negative impression of them since I hate when games go freemium while ruining the experience that used to be in the paid app.
I did some further research and apparently they got some backlash when they went free because they didn't give much currency to the paid players and you needed to use currency to get the game back to where it was pre-update. So that probably put them on my shit list, but looking at all this information again nearly two years later I feel kind of indifferent about it now lol. I'll probably still wait for a sale if MV is that short, though. >_>