LTU_btc got his account recovered in November within 4 days. Refer here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.24907492
Bitcoinbazaar.net aka premium_domainer also got his account recovered this year. Refer here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.27843795
So your accusation of 0 accounts being restored this past calender year is no longer alive.
Account recoveries are headache, it may not seem like it, but it is a big one. One reason why:
Sometimes the issue is that, the Bitcoin address that is staked, its private key is sold along with the account. If the old account holder used a VPN/TOR and the new account holder also does the same,then investigation becomes complicated.
Now theymos's statement on account recovery:
It would take at least a couple hours every day to deal with them. Each case typically requires a lot of follow-up. And it's really annoying work. I used to do them sort-of regularly, but at some point I just couldn't stand it anymore, in addition to not really having time. Cyrus is still doing some, though not enough to keep up.
There's no need for any fee, and a fee probably wouldn't be appropriate unless absolutely necessary. Money is not a problem. If I could throw $100k at the problem and make it go away, I would do so. But in the real world, there is no magic wishing well where you can throw money and make things happen. You give people money and they don't do what you want, or the people you hire turn out not to be trustworthy, or you fill out the tax forms wrong and then later have to spend more time&money dealing with that than you would've by just doing the thing with current sub-optimal resources, etc.
I acknowledge that the current situation is very bad, and we have some plans for fixing it. I hope to have manual account reviews going smoothly again before the end of the year at the latest.
Yes, this would be very useful. I hate that I'm basically acting as a CEO here. I hate dealing with lawyers and accountants, or figuring out who to hire. This stuff is not my wheelhouse, and is in fact not even on my ship. I wish that someone would take all of that business-related stuff off my hands. But it looks like that's the one aspect which is most difficult to (safely) get rid of, so I've been trying (with only a bit of success) to delegate in other areas.