@coratorium I think a couple of things openly acknowledged in Gio's article go against this assumption.

For one, beyond both containing a readable copy of the comic, a working site and an offline collection both have very different cons and advantages: having the whole comic up there on the web provides the accessibility that everyone seems to be talking about nowadays and can also double as a frontpage for keeping the fandom updated on what's going on - both super essential things to have for the longevity of the brand; but the offline collection is both offline and a collection - it has all those extra bits and deluxe material for the more dedicated reader, which Gio insinuates was Hussie's exact intention by offering the missing commentary as a collection-exclusive feature.

Roach was also talking about the site being actively worked on at least as far back as January of 2024 (https://beyondcanon.com/news/newspost-1704167374) when this deal with the UHC was still in the process of being discussed, which Gio also mentions in the blog post.

I can certainly see how getting the UHC deal done was probably a priority so that people had a way to read homestuck in the meantime, while the site continued to be finished... but that's already how people were using the collection, anyway? It was the most widely used stopgap while we waited for the site to come back online, and Hussie was happy to refer to it when asked how to find the comic. So even if we were to take everything Gio says in the article on its face as truth, I don't see how your theory makes sense as an explanation why things happened the way they did