I'm pretty sure he'll be back. Just needs a break to recharge his batteries.

Actually, when was the last time he had a real vacation?

The Ghostcrawler Experiement was too good in my opinion. Quality rather than quantity is what I suspect we'll see in return. The WoW community is an interesting culture and I am not sure they really appreciated or realized how lucky they were to have access to a warm body behind the scenes.

I agree with the last part of your post Kyth.
He actually already corrected that post, saying he will continue to monitor and answer to threads (and infact he did in the alst few days). It seems he will just post less?
Anyway, it's a bad idea. You can easily compare the "Class Roles Forums" with their twins in EU forum (the ones GC recently said spawn "great ideas"): the forums are indeed a big desert.
Sure, there are less trolls, there are less junk posts but that's only statistical since there are so few posts. And 90% of them don't proced further than 1-2 pages of discussion.

There are several issues, though, in the way these new forums have been used and managed in the last year. According to GC they are intended to accomplish a double goal:
a) to make the classes inherent to a same role to discuss, share, argue and confront over issues of classes and class balance
b) to offer "feedback" helping developers to make "informed decisions" while doing their jobs

The first goal is destined to fail miserably. The number of posts where a civil discussion about class issues involving posters from other classes is depressingly low. So you have on one hand threads which are basically the reproduction of Class Forums, on the other never ending troll wars and flame fests.
It's the second goal which is more interesting to analyze and it's personally the one that makes me feel ambivalent towards GC. First of all, it's so terribly vague. Players are invited to "bring up issues", "support them with hard data" and "yet anecdotal experiences are not dismissed", they are assured that "a change in designing philosophy had happened" and that "changes will happen faster" and "you shouldn't left behind, were you to about to fall, for more than a tier of raiding".
So what happens? Players take those words seriosuly and start to offer what's requested. Except that, more often than not, after doing that they are reminded that "this is not what these forums are about". There are exceptions, but they really look quite often to be totally non transparent regarding what made them "right for this forum" confronted with others.
We might all agree that the recent Shadow Priest offensive went a little out of hand in many occasions. Yet, there are countless, countless of excellent threads made by excellent players/theorycrafters (I mean, Delmortis caliber...). Not only that, it's also one of the rare cases when 90% of people agree, since facts are indeed UNDENIABLE: Shadow Priests Dmg output in PVE is becoming worse as gear progress.
The answer to this is: "we think shadow priest dps is fine". And again, to people presenting hard data and first-hand experiences to ask for an issue to be taken care of, the refrain "this is not what these forums are meant to be". So, what the forums are for? "To help developers make informed decisions" because "this is not an open source project".
This is THE problem. What are we expected to do then? Offer data with "tabula rasa" mind, not asking, not commenting, not analyzing? Just be "parses machines"? But there is NO NEED for the comunity to do that. Blizzard has plenty of ways to get those data.
What sometimes these "methodology posts" by GC create is a sort of "guinea pigs" feeling in those who are indeed asked to post.
Players "lobbying" for changes are not the problem. It should be the goal of the forums. Lobbying is not a sin per se; it becomes a problem when it becomes an invisibile mafia style. But when it's in the open, it's democratically controlled. Mages lobbying for buffs it's not only legit, it's what they should be expected to do; the forums should be a place where that happens openly, thus making the requests stutinized by a large comunity offering different point of views.

Gc should post more, not less. GC shouldn't be the only dev to post. Yes, they should make the forums more blog-styled, with topics offered (a sort of "weekly class reviews"), more devs-directed, more heavily moderated. And they should really stop using the jokes a la "GC promised me a pony" to cover this "secretive aura" around their work. People whine now, people will whine again. Nothing you can do about it. But you can indeed improve the experiences for the "good" part of the forums, which, ideally, should improve the benefits the devs gain from it.
For now, it still feels that the class role forums experiment is half cooked and ambiguous.

P.S : It should be the topic of another thread but I can't help myself in bringing this up. PVP comunity hurts a LOT. While PVE can indeed starts heated discussions, it's very rare for them to equalize the pits of shame that the PVP comunity produces (even supposedly "elite" one -no, Arena JUnkies is NOTHING like Elitist Jerks). It shouldn't be a surprise, assuming PVE is a cooperative style of play, and PVP is competitive - with all tis consequences. I add, as a little provocation, that GC might wanna be more careful while choosing "consiglieri" from PVP community, to avoid in the future choosing someone who brags about his supposedly "behind the curtains" job everywhere and who turns out to be a botter in bgs and banned. I thinkt hat thing had something to do even with GC backing up a little from posting.

P.P.S I took your word about loving wall of texts very seriously Kyth, I hope I didn't exagerate -.-'