Disclaimer: As rude as it sounds, I don't care about the personal live of the developer and personal choices he has made in the past. This review is intended for the software XenPorta 2 and level of support it received up to version 1.0.5a only.
First I want to talk about XenPorta 1. XenPorta 1 was a decent add-on, but it had a few issues which prevented me from using it. Mostly those issues are not issues per se, but missing features. I have suggested features and some were added, some not. Sometimes I felt ignored and would wipe XenPorta 1 completly from my installation out of frustration (multiple times). From my experience, support for XenPorta 1 has been disastrous (for some, perhaps the biggest issue with XenPorta 1).
Fast forward comes the announcement of XenPorta 2, which promised to be more feature rich and supported add-on, because it was a paid add-on. The development took nearly a year, so when it was released I was eager to check it out. The price of $40 seems very reasonable to me. I was relieved that my missing suggestions had been implemented (including a much needed tags feature, which can greatly enhance your site if used correctly). Other features and improvements are a dedicated authors page and authors block, better performance, support for three different types of comments (local, disqus and facebook), a category filtering option etc.
With XenPorta 1 you couldn't quite mimic a WordPress based news/magazine site due to missing features, but with XenPorta 2 this is possible now. As far as I know, XenPorta 2 is the only add-on for XenForo that can do this. There are other solutions but they don't have the feature set to compete with WordPress.
Features are good and all, but they are only good as long as the product is supported, because what use has a software if you are stuck trying to solve an issue? I have been monitoring the XenPorta 2 thread closely and fortunately the support has been great. Unlike with XenPorta 1 in the past, the developer answers questions, solves issues and even implements features users request very quickly. It even exists a FAQ. It's obvious that the developer puts effort into supporting his add-on. I hope the level of support will continue and am looking forward to the future of this add-on.