@The_Alpha_Furyan pretty much summed up most things I want to say here, but I'll add a few words.
The Valve example is pretty radical though. Yes, absolutely, one can achieve great things with a small team - for sure! Do we have 12 full-time paid employees? Nope. 6? Nope. 3? Nope. 1? Nope.
I think it's counterproductive to throw people under the bus and I won't, but sadly being listed as a member of something doesn't mean the workload is shared evenly. Sometimes people take expected breaks, sometimes unexpected. I wish I could say I spent 50% of my time developing. The amount of messages from our users to me on the forums, email, PSN, WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook etc etc is in itself almost enough for a full-time job. What we've done now is aimed to funnel it into a help desk, so more of our staff members can look at things and free my hands, but evidently this transition process takes time.
I agree about most of the things you said and how things should be handled and believe me, these are things I'm well aware of (though a reminder is sometimes in place, honestly) and as a person that demands very much of myself, sometimes eat at me. I definitely agree that we can work on our transparency and communication, to lift the illusion of nothing happening. Sometimes it's just a lot of invisible work that will make sense in the end, but until details are finalized, it's worthless and possibly can't even be discussed.
On the tech side we haven't been flexing too much with fresh stuff lately, agreed. What we have done though, is made notable progress in the scene here in Finland and in the process developed some very good contacts and shown that we can produce a good high-quality live event for the top versus players. Continuing this work will help us produce more of these, eventually 6vs6 and also in other countries. Whether or not these are your cup of tea, I don't know, but I'm for one am proud of what we've accomplished and what we've working towards.
Now, back to the tech part. We do indeed need some more hands on that. I actually brought in a guy (close friend of mine) and introduced him to what's under the hood. He tried hard to help out, but he was unable to be effective with it, while doing his other projects and taking care of his kids and family.
I'm aware of some other candidates that could have the talent to help out, but I either need to trust that person with my life, or we need to (and we really do) work a bit with the architecture to allow access to smaller parts of the system and develop that way, instead of allowing access to absolutely everything. @Lurkins and I have certainly put the website on its knees a few times by being a bit sloppy in the wrong files and I wouldn't wish that on anyone else. Not to mention that a person with an ill intent could really do some damage with too much access.
Concerning the "be patient", I completely understand that someone saying that doesn't exactly help at all. I try to avoid such things, but I know I can be annoyingly diplomatic about certain things and not say too much. The fact is though, that some of us work on this stuff for hours and hours and sacrifice sleep and other things to get this ship to where we want it (that definitely includes technology) and it's hard not to take it personally sometimes when people make blunt comments without knowing how much work is put into this. You've made a good point though - how could you, as it's not really documented?
I really do appreciate your feedback and ideas @MartindalexC. I think it's a good idea to have a private talk and see how you could be able to help out.