@Kevin Muldoon - Matt answered your questions already in his post. The biggest reason for purchasing WPTavern and WLTC was for archiving purposes. By purchasing both sites, he insured that the content on those sites would not be lost forever, or be put into the wrong hands. The content on each site is like a WordPress time capsule covering specific periods of time. WLTC was instrumental in the early days of WordPress while WPTavern became an important destination in the later years. If I decided to walk away from WordPress, I can guarantee you that WPTavern.com and WLTC would simply stay online and just server as time capsules. But I was able to work out a deal to continue on with WPTavern, which is why I'm still around publishing content.

Regarding being impartial, I'll paste a response I left at WPDaily on the same topic.

If people on the outside come to WPTavern.com and automatically think it’s a Mullenweg property, then that means I have failed at my job. Other than being funded, Matt’s primary role as it relates to WPTavern is like an adviser. Helping me direct the ship in the right direction. Sure, every now and then he’ll suggest a plugin, theme or service that I should look into reviewing as he did with WooCommerce on it’s release but outside of that, he does not tell me what to write and how to write it. That’s my job

The interesting thing about this relationship between me, the tavern and Matt is that if Matt starts telling me what to write, how to write it, etc, then the Tavern will fail. I’ve already proven in the past 4 years that I know what I’m doing, it’s just that I ran out of money and time. That’s not an issue anymore. Now that I have both, I have been put into a position to accomplish my goal of turning WPTavern into a large, friendly community of both new WordPress users and enthusiasts.

In reality, I'll never be able to get around the fact that Matt owns the Tavern and Automattic so therefor, some trickery must be afoot, but as long as I don't focus on that and just do my thing, it won't be a problem.

@Ryan Hellyer - I'm still unsure as to why entire site feeds were imported into the Planet Feed. It doesn't make sense. It makes much more sense to just use their WordPress specific feed. It's more beneficial to everyone. My hope is that if a sites WordPress category was added to the feed, then only their best WordPress stuff would be published to that category. That would definitely bump up the relevancy/usefulness factor of the planet feed.