I didn’t really, just joking around since they poached Mike Farney just as he was starting to write shaders for Cycles 
I say congrats to Brecht and thanks for all of his hard work on Cycles, I guess in some way it paid off for him, and that’s great!
I also hope Cycles continues to progress, but it seems that the community believes in pushing cycles and it’s not at risk of stagnating much.
I guess we all shouldn’t be naive; Brecht will no longer be involved in developing Blender, that’s the way it is. When you have a new job, new responsibilities, you are in a new country, starting something completly new in your life, you don’t have so much free time anymore.
Look, even if you are hired as a 3d graphic your spare time for some personal projects is dramatically decreased. You are too tired, you don’t feel like staring at a screen for hours anymore and sometimes you are just fed up with coding/modelling.
Perhaps keeping Brecht hired in BF for like 10hours/week would help to keep him on board but I guess there is too much of a risk for him, he cannot be involved in something that’s now a kind of a competition.