The only thing that will save Minetime from starting to go downhill is the new replacements for Empires and Survival Games, if they are even going to be replaced.
I am sorry that your staff is so small you can barely get anything done within a year. You post an announcement every couple of months, there needs to be more updates. If you have too few staff simply get more. You certainly have the money to hire some free lancers from Spigot that are top-notch. We're just upset and don't care how we put things, but we like Minetime. We don't want it to go downhill, but that's where it seems to be going. I am not saying you aren't doing things to help Minetime recover, you just aren't doing enough. They're many solutions to Minetime's and you could solve them with money and general threads asking if the community would like to see some example feature added. I am not saying go blow the monthly donations on every fancy plugin on Spigot, but I am saying it would be nice for some new features. I am not just talking about Factions, but every Minetime server. Later today or tomorrow I'll release a list of plugins that players can vote for. Hopefully the community will like some. Anyways, sorry for going off topic.
After reading all of this, I think the reason why your thread was deleted was because it was becoming a source of negativity (even though it wasn't necessarily about any of the complaints Jess listed) regardless of whether the thread was intended for good or not at the beginning. People were probably complaining in that thread (I can't remember as well anymore if anyone actually did).
I'm not saying you specifically, and that fact that you assume we are talking about "a large part of the community" is a perfect example of problem. We are not talking about many people at all, just a small, though very vocal, subset of players who seem to think they're somehow omniscient and know how to do everything better than people that have been doing it for years, despite many of these players having already failed at it themselves. The sheer amount of off-base rhetoric and propaganda that these players pump out is being used to flood the server with the opinions of these few in attempt to make their concerns feel paramount to any actual issues that are being addressed. Of course, by the time one of them gives up and stops or just leaves, they have indoctrinated two more to perpetuate the issue and drink their Kool-Aid. This leads to many more threads about how "things are going downhill" and "The only way to save Minetime is to drop all current important projects and do exactly what I want you to" and "I'm quitting because they didn't give me /kill <player> in pvp" or "OMG halp the ranks are soooo overpowered, I'm gonna quit" or "Fix your problems by throwing money into a pit" etc... Problem is, none of them can even agree on what is "the problem". As if it's not bad enough that they are trying to harm the playercount with overblown and off-base commentary about every little thing, they are also all tearing the community and server apart, trying to pull in every different direction. They're trying to stop any actual work that is already in the process of being done so they can push their own agendas, which they undoubtedly will complain about how their own idea is causing the fall of Minetime after it were done (if it were done) anyway. Which leaves us between a rock and a hard place. We can either keep doing what we can while doing our best to combat this issue, which will slowly leech players away unless the community actually joins in and helps combat these players too, or we could try to address their every overblown concern, frenzying in a thousand different directions causing a mess and tearing the server apart. My sincerest hope is that, with the help of community members who have not already been brainwashed, we can make this community whole again and continue working on updates and new content. However, the choice to drop, and combat, this negative hivemind mentality and help ensure a better future for the server is ultimately up to you, members of the community. You have the power to help make this server great, or to keep tearing it down.