Actually, in days gone by, Rob & Epik, DID provide good service. Usually very good service. They were worthy of praise at that time. Was there an element of the latter part of your statement as well? For sure. It never sat real well with me but I gave Rob the benefit of the doubt because the service was good, and not every personality is going to gel with your own. Maybe to my detriment, I overlooked many of those traits for too long.
I've got no idea what has gone on in the meantime, nor who did what exactly, but from what we've heard there is almost no doubt that things that are going on now are criminal (e.g. the non-payment of Kathleen, since Epik were acting as an Escrow service). It's a sorry state of affairs.
I suspect that Rob started out with great intentions, but got massively out of his depth. He's an Ideas Man and things like NameLiquidate were a great thing for the industry I reckon. But as was evident time and time again, he wasn't great with details. He developed things on the fly - NL and a bunch of other things were pretty lousy at the outset, but he believed in 'crowd innovation' - he had the initial idea, then we all threw in our 2c worth and it was developed on the fly until it reached some sort of maturity. The problem is that he seems to have taken the same sort of approach to everything. And when it comes to Escrow and Payment Services, those things can't just be improved as you go - you need to start out with a regulatory framework, compliances, and so on, in place from the get-go. Otherwise, you end up co-mingling funds, moving people's money to your own in-house payment service, etc until.. well, the rest is history...
What a shame there wasn't someone who could have harnessed his ideas and helped implement them in an organized manner.