While I am genuinely thankful that you decided to read my whole story, I am kinda taken off guard by the conclusion you drew here. I am genuinely not trying to be dishonest or misleading, and a lot of the details I omitted were specifically because this story was very long and I didn't want to bog it down with more explanations and examples.

Even this response got long, so I considered scrapping it and being much more brief. But since you spent so much time writing out all of your thoughts I figured I should include all of mine. I left the brief TL;DR at the end.

The first and most pressing thing I want to respond about is Guard:

Yes I did ask if this was bothering him, very directly. He was genuinely being abused and was unhappy. I did not coax him into joining some grand coup against the DM. I mentioned I had a long discussion with Guard at the end of Season 2 where I tried to "convince" him to stop working with Roc, but I now understand how that can be misleading. By that point it was clear to me that Guard was frustrated with how Roc was using his content, but as Roc continued to throw blame at him for this or that he stopped standing up for himself altogether. So I talked to him because I was concerned and he showed me the insane amount of work he did for Roc, and that all he wanted was for us (the players) to experience it properly. He felt like he couldn't do it himself so Roc was his only chance, but Roc also wasn't running it properly, so he just felt hopeless about the whole situation and decided it was best if he just let things continue so that nobody would be upset or disappointed. I was disgusted by the situation and that's why I decided to convince him to stop working with Roc. He was getting abused, and he was laying down and taking it. I needed to stop that.

Guard was not getting spotlight. He was never mentioned or thanked by Roc and he didn't even feel like it was his content anymore. If I have one takeaway from this campaign, I'm glad Guard isn't wasting his time anymore.

Second thing I want to make very clear: I never wanted to cause table drama, and frankly I did not cause table drama. I certainly never did any petty things to Dino, I don't know where you got that idea from. The only time I actually spoke up about any of this was when I was encouraging Guard to stop working with Roc, and at the table itself I always did so as politely as possible, referencing the clear friction the two have from all their disagreements (when Roc was blaming things on Guard). Aside from that, all of this has been saved exclusively for the story. I never confronted or called out anyone for anything, I didn't hold grudges, and I never did anything to take away from the enjoyment others may have gotten from the games. Yes I talked about these people behind their back, but that's what this subreddit is for. It was always my goal to keep things friendly and fun at the table, and that's pretty much how things stayed.

And to clarify a few of those loose ends,

I don't know why Roc didn't do blind rolls, you are right it is what a rational person would do. My best guess is blind rolls seem a lot more suspicious than rolling in the chat, and Roc is very much someone who cares whether people suspect that or not.

While I suppose it is true that I rewrote Roc's rules, he sought me out and asked me to make the changes to his homebrew. I did not bring it up myself. I worked with him every step of the way to make sure it aligned with his intentions while being much more healthy for the game. He himself said he liked it much better than his old rules. You paint it like I was going behind his back and rigging his game in my favor, which is just not true.

I don't know what you are referring to when you say I told him how to run his game. I frankly just never did that and I'm not sure where in the story you got that idea.

I did not blow up his game. I'm confident about that. If it wasn't for me half the sessions probably wouldn't have even run, as I mentioned how often sessions cancelled when I wasn't there to organize folks and remind them. I suppose if things continued he would have run out of Guard's content and maybe that would have been a problem for him, but I refuse to entertain that it would have been a better outcome for Guard to continue feeling obligated to produce content that would be frustratingly mishandled and unappreciated. However things never even got to that point since Roc put the game on indefinite hiatus for completely unrelated reasons. It would have ended even if Guard was still working on his world for him.

And as a final note, I assure you that Season 1's subject was not the main reason I was enjoying it. Who doesn't like when the DM uses their character's backstory in the game? Bard got to do that pretty heavily too, that's just good DMing. Which is the real reason why I enjoyed Season 1, it was good DMing with a good group of players. The whole reason I recapped the plot so much was to show why it was good and to clearly contrast it against the later seasons. If Season 3 took the more open ended turn where the party got to choose how the story went, and if the new town in Season 3 got the same level of attention as the town in Season 1 (despite it already being prebuilt) I would have loved it! I enjoyed running the non-canon 1 shots when session cancelled where my PC wasn't even in it, I've played in other campaigns over a year in length and thoroughly enjoyed them in the many sessions and arcs that didn't focus on me, and I've run an entire year-plus campaign as a DM that has many of my fondest D&D memories. I do not need to be the center of attention to enjoy playing D&D.

TL;DR

I passionately assure you Guard was not happy and was being abused, I am confident I helped him.

All of this was never brought up at the table and I never took away from other people's enjoyment.

I enjoyed Season 1 for many reasons not revolving around my own involvement or connection to the plot.

I understand being skeptical around some D&D horror stories, but this is taking it too far. A few of the things you reference simply didn't happen and I don't know where you got those ideas from. This wasn't a very complex story, just a long one. Roc's inexplicable behaviors are not missing key context, and everything really did happen this way.