Patrick has been on record for quite some time that he is forgoing his maximum earnings in consulting to focus on his other businesses.

I won't speak for him, but is it really that hard to understand? Once you hit a certain income level, doing work that is interesting trumps maximizing paychecks by several orders of magnitude (at least I found that to be true).

Putting a nice little bow on a hobby project he's run for a decade and getting paid for it sound pretty good to me. Not to mention all the new learning he's just leveled up on.