Sorry for the slow responses here, I'll get to everything I can as I can.
Just some disclaimers- I have not worked on the project since October 2017, so I cannot speak past that. I started almost directly after the kickstarter failed, as a volunteer.
Why did you bail?
This would sort of be a long story, but I'll try to keep it short and to the point.
I was working a fulltime 3D job during the day(which started to become more and more involved as time went on). I was then coming home and still putting in 20-30 hours a week on Pantheon as the only environment artist for years. It really started to wear on me; and the salary I was making was justifying it less and less. As we did begin getting help in that department, I took a bit of a hiatus to relieve some of the burnout and get my work life balance back in order. Began talking with the team a few months later about how I wanted to move forward, and contribute and one day Chris Perkins just flat out stopped responding so I didn't pursue it anymore and went on to do other contracts (which worked out far, far better).
Leading up to that I had a lot of concerns about how we were doing things in the environment art area, my work was being undone as I moved to other areas. Which I understood to a degree, but not completely. A lot of what I developed initially was RnD and we needed to come up with a cohesive art pipeline; this did eventually come together as advancements in the engine happened and our developed tool set came together.
We started to get some REALLY good help, Bruno (Tech artist) was a god-send for the project, and having Jared on concept art was a really nice step. I do think they probably have a smooth art pipeline at this time, but probably still could use a lot of extra man hours.
Do you really count as a dev if you never got paid for your work because Brad stole it from you?
Initially I did come on as a volunteer as much of the early team did. As we started producing environments, and Daniel started to get a lot of the project functionality cleaned up, the game started to show far better and funding began coming in. Once we had funding and budgeting figured out, I was offered a salary, and was consistently paid the agreed amount from there on out. My software costs were also covered. I was never "screwed out of money" or paid any money for the rite to develop.
Ill get to more later.