With Ilya's post, particularly:
'4. We do not at this time have anyone doing community relations, which means we spend less time than we’d like to interacting with you, or rather, providing answers to your questions. We are up on these boards every day reading what you have to say, and it does often drive our design decisions and priorities.'
I think we see that he is officially signing off as public relations liasion.
No more weekly updates, probably just posts introducing new patches and other 'official communications.'
Whether this is wise or not who knows. As others have stated, there are a steady stream of complaints here when he posts and when he doesn't.
I do know from personal experience that dealing with 'customer service' issues takes a special kind of patience and it can be very distracting from other more essential tasks, which in his case are continuing to lead the efforts to fix and develop the game.