I understand and agree with this. It really is confusing for normal people. Having said that, interpreting this as an "exit scam" of some sort would be the wrong choice (I don't say you do). I personally think it would be almost impossible to cover his costs just from donations. The work that he has done for us is at least multiple months worth of salaries for highly skilled professionals. And the additional hardware itself required to do any kind of work like this costs thousands of USD. Look at the prices of
"PS3 DECR" or "PS3 reference tool" on Ebay as an example. That also does not include tools to fix hardware or do some kind of modifications.
Furthermore, there is evidence that the PS3Xploit team is spending money on the actual hosting and domains. All of the domains (I know of 4, not sure if I should share them here) were bought way back in August. This coincides perfectly with what was shared by the team on this forum - some domains are for "private" projects, at least one is for community projects. All of the domains are also linked to a webhosting service, some of them also to paid tiers of Cloudflare (they do have free tiers, but some of the features used here are paid).
Rough calculation of the costs so far: 3 years of .net, 1 year of .org, 3 years of .com, 1 year of .me. 500 Malaysian Ringgits for that. 8x 99 RM for 8 years of webhosting, with a discount for new customers. 1300 RM or $300 total. The cost of paid Cloudflare tiers is anywhere from $20 to $40 per month, depending on the features selected. At least one of the domains has that - 5x $20 to $40 paid by now.
$300 + ($100 / $200) =
$400 - $500 spent so far
Remember that I don't have any access to their accounting, so this number is more probably underestimated by a lot. If this was just for a show, they better be escaping with millions from donations

.
I have a better question to think about. How did we get to this situation to begin with? At first glance, you could claim that "Of course, that is because BGToolset is closed source and a private project. We only got to this situation because of his selfishness.". Did we, though?
From personal experience, I can say that bguerville has shared more or less everything about his project. It isn't that hard to go through his old steps and learn about all the pitfalls along the way. But again - it costs time and money.
Was the decision to keep the project private a bad one? Honestly, not all. It brought us a stable and refined jailbreak toolset, together with awesome new ideas. We couldn't have asked for a better reference project to observe and learn from.
But sure it would have been better if there were mirrors based on the public source code, right? I don't think so. Look at the situation with the clones. All of them are out of date and not maintained by anyone with enough knowledge to know how it works, let alone to fix it. And it only makes it harder to make new alternatives, since users by some reason trust clones more than anyone who tries to solve the underlying issue. So what did clones even bring us, other than bricked consoles and sad users? Well... no new research, no bugfixes, no new features... nothing. It's as simple as that.