It's got to be a major struggle maintaining motivation in the face of aggressive and ungrateful users. It's bad enough when they're giving you money, it must be much worse when they're not.
As far as I know it is mostly more immature emulators that struggle with straight out "stolen work" - something tells me the triforce branch is more a matter of "let's get triforce to work and then we can get it working well with the main branch again afterwards"