I think basically what you say is true.
If you donate you support the existing course of a project. So if I donate to Elysium and they shut down the server, then I would be pissed too.
But you cannot expect to get special treatment because you donated a specific high amount or any amount at all.
I don't know all the reasons behind this, but if the guild donated, then made claims and took their money back after they were declined, then shame on them.
Also it's not Elysiums fault if they calculated with donated money and then got in trouble after it was gone again.
At least we got some info about that case (I am honestly not very happy about how long it took to give us these infos).
PS: My guess is, that the server is really running on Amazon Echo, since seconds before the server went down, I asked a friend of mine ingame, if he thinks that the CIA can read what we are writing in chat.
