It's not that I hate money, it's that I pledged on Kickstarter so you'd make a cool thing. You made a cool thing, I got to read about its development and watch all the update videos, and now you're releasing it to the community under MIT (or similar) license. As far as I'm concerned we're square.
I know the Kickstarter project was planned as an RPG and maybe you could have throw together a game using the engine as it stood a year ago just to call the project done, but I don't think that would have been a better outcome.
Feel exactly the same. Backed the kickstarter because I was once (a long time ago) also interested in writing a voxel engine but never had the time, and since then - everything voxel related peaked my interest.
The updates were always nice, and I've always thought of it ending up as an SDK/playground for voxel technology, and never as eventually a real game. If it would become opensource, in my view - that would make it a successful kickstarter, and not a failed-one.
I think part of it is that you made the sincere offer of refund, and gave people control over that. Regardless of how reasonable it is for a sincere creator to keep the money on a failed project, people still appreciate being able to have the option to 'pull out' on failure.