I honestly think that the Dev is away for Chinese New Year as a lot of the Chinese Dev's have gone on a break stating so, maybe he was yanked out of there so quick he didn't have time to explain because of his strict family.
Even my friends & colleagues who are of that ethnicity have gone away with their family's to celebrate.
All the people dumping at this price are gonna be p!$$ed off in the coming days to a week.
Slight problem with your point:
He is not Chinese.
I think I agree. Judging from his writing style - and I am no expert, this is just a guess - I would bet he's Russian.
Hopefully he's doing OK. It doesn't make a lot of sense for me that a dev with that much talent would come to this point with a coin and abandon it.
What a weird scam this would be:
1) Learn enough about coding and crypto to become an elite programmer
2) Launch your own coin based on Darkcoin's codebase, with unique niche-building tweaks
3) Evaluate and find bugs in Darkcoin; submit bug fixes to Darkcoin to build up community trust
4) Implement a unique masternode system and organize a testnet launch for this feature
5) Disappear completely (profit?)
It seems to me that a scammer would do things in a much easier or more profitable way. For example, why not string it along for just a couple more weeks, launch masternodes in production, and make your exit then, when there will most likely be a big pump?
Anything is possible in crypto, and maybe this is a scam; but man, it just doesn't quite add up for me...