So this is not some grieving random person from crowd - Chas is a person whose libraries and contributions I value tremendously and he certainly made LOTS of contributions to clojure OSS landscape for free and out of his good will as well. So ultimately this feels like your parents are arguing (which is never a good thing) - you like them both and you just want the arguing to stop and you just want everybody to live together in harmony. But here you go, Chas has moved away from clojure now. And I have to say I am very sorry to see him go.
I am genuinely curious why you, or anyone else, would think he is right. I can see why people would agree or why he wants to do things a certain way, but to be right you have to have arguments backing up what you are saying. I don't see that in this post. Am I missing something?
Because Rich has the rights to do what he wants with his time and money. (Like everybody else.) It is completely within his rights to establish his own governance and contribution model for his version of Clojure. At the very least, I don't see an argument why it's NOT within his rights to do so.
Of course, there are several corollaries. The first is that nobody is forced to use or contribute to Clojure. The second is that, given that Clojure is Free Software, it's possible for someone else to pick up the baton, make a fork, and run it their own way. (egcs and XEmacs both come to mind as examples where someone did this and it wound up improving the original.... so there _is_ precedent.)
I wouldn't feel terribly bad if someone made this fork, but I'm not going to do it myself. Unlike Rich, I'm not willing at the moment to make the personal sacrifices that'd be required to make this sort of contribution. Neither, apparently, is anyone else.
So Rich gets to make the rules. Because he (and Cognitect) have paid the dues. Whether that's good for Clojure in the long run remains to be seen. (But honestly, my semi-informed take on the ecosystem is that it needs library maintenance much more than it does core language improvements. The core language has been an excellent choice for many purposes for years.)
If everyone is free to do what they want with their own time and money, they are also free to condition their participation in the project. As far as I can tell that is not what he is saying though. What he is saying is that you are not entitled to anything, meaning that you can't expect anything for your participation.
If he had just said that he runs the project how he want and people can "take it or leave it" that would be another thing. But as I read it he is specially questions the right of others to question the project. Essentially saying that they don't have that right. It is this position I don't see him backing up with an argument.