I agree.
The other problem would be the learning curve for whoever took it over. I'll try to over simplify it here.
Exactly. You could sweeten the pot to workout a transition consulting gig for HT to standup a new team, but someone about to run something like that is going to cost you in the 120k range in the DFW area (at the very least). Throw that in you month NET profit calc and see what you have left.
The most rational path would be for a competitor to buy him out, close AH to kill a competition, contract HT to migrate his MMO server tech to back their front end client, like IL2 or DCS or CP. That could give them a quick leg up on achieving what took HT decades.
AH has the best MMO server tech in the business, IMHO. That is a severable, viable, fungible asset that would have real value. That would allow DCS or IL2 (or possibly CP) to focus on their core competency and simply BUY the server tech they need as a near turn-key solution rather than spend 5-8 years more trying to re-roll their own and not benefiting from the decades of experience and all the hard lessons HT has already worked through.
In that case it would only make sense to shut down AH to not cannibalize their projects.
A LOT of tech companies do that. Simply buy and absorb. Faster and simpler than home growing. Microsoft did a ton of that. Google simply bought Youtube. It didn't invent it or develop it itself or duplicate another version of their own.