In my opinion the farm analogy doesn't work because you can't fork a farm and continue working where the original left off. In my opinion Dominic should have simply stopped maintaining the package, and maybe added a message stating that the package is no longer being maintained. If someone wants to take over then they would need to fork it. That would force people to consciously switch to the newer forked versions and there would be no surprises about a new maintainer suddenly inserting malicious code.