Ages back I decided to help out with a Duke Nukem wiki, and ended up designing most of it from scratch (I've since left it). This inspired me to make the Essentials wiki, as I really like the wiki format and Essentials really needed better documentation. Again, I made practically all of it myself, and still do.
I'd also been doing a few things towards making my own Pokémon game. A lot of it involved redesigning the GUIs, which naturally gave me a lot of experience with Essentials' scripts. I fixed a few broken things as I went along, and developed some ideas.
Around that time poccil stopped updating Essentials. Eventually I thought that perhaps he could hand it over to someone else who would continue his work, and the wiki seemed a decent owner. I asked, he agreed. In practice, that meant I had it. I made a release to get the ball rolling, and somehow just ended up doing it all myself since. Of course I've had some contributions (including your Vs animation which I tweaked a bit; I don't know if you've had a look at it), but Essentials has definitely become mine now rather than a community effort. It's a bit of a shame, because I'm bound to lose interest/free time at some point and there's no one to take over. Still, it's partly my fault for not being more active in finding others to work with.
I like helping out, and developing Essentials helps out everyone who uses it. I think I would prefer it to making my own fangame, because it benefits everyone rather than just my own project. That's also why the TCG extension I'm currently making will also be made available to anyone who wants to use it; and I won't bother making my own game out of it.