Why I don't believe there will be an apology.

I don't think they're shocked by the backlash. I think this is more or less what they expected. (Though maybe not to this extent, idk)

This decision wasn't made for the benefit of their fanbase. Their video makes that abundantly clear. Just look at their faces. That's the look of someone breaking up with their partner. Not the face of someone proposing a marriage. They knew they were going to lose most of their followers in doing this, they accepted it and they took the calculated risk that enough people would follow them to make this sustainable. They knew this was going to be a wildly unpopular move and they did it anyway.

And I believe the main driving force behind this is ego.

Like a lot of people, my initial knee-jerk reaction was also to pin this on Steven, but the longer I've had to think about this, the more obvious it becomes to me that this has Ryan written all over it.

Ryan has mentioned over and over that he wants to make highly edited TV-quality content, that has always been his ambition and his dream. He literally brings this up all the time. This was his goal in starting this company and I don't find it that hard to believe that his ambition got him to a point where he believed this would be a good idea.

I think Steven just wants to make money and find a way to get back to his Worth It glory days, so this seems like a logical step for him as well. I don't think he has thought about how it looks when an objectively wealthy dude ask his (mostly broke) audience to pay out of pocket for his over the top expensive food tour that (almost) nobody asked for, because good grief, it looks catastrophically bad. And I think that's part of why he's catching most of the flack here.

I don't really know about Shane, I always thought he just wants a platform to be his weird and wonderful self and actually make a living from that, but at this point, who knows? He's clearly still on board.

They built something amazing that could not have happened without a loyal fanbase filled with people willing to donate because they believed in them being able to grow and keep producing good content. I know, I was one of them.

But in blatantly reducing their creative business to a numbers game they have lost all goodwill with their most loyal fans, that's solely on them and I believe it to be intentional.

I have been supporting them on Patreon from day one, and I cancelled my subscription the second their last video came out.

Because if it comes down purely to numbers, as they have made abundantly clear is the case for them, it's not financially feasible for me to pay $6 per month for what still boils down to just one YouTube channel. It's absurdly overpriced and like most of you, I never gave a crap about high production quality. 

We are no longer their projected demographic. They've moved on, we should probably do the same.

EDIT: Whelp, looks like I was completely wrong. I truly wasn't expecting an apology after that last video and so much time, but there it is.