Although I caught Prelude around the time of it's release (which showed great promise), I'd all but forgotten about it until January 2016 when the legal news broke - a great deal of time had passed since Prelude, after all!
Over the course of several weeks I listened to all 36 podcasts from
trek.fm and you can actually track the changes in AP's attitude from 4th July 2014 from the budding film maker (who hoped to have his fan film done in early 2015) to the wannabe studio mogul, beloved by all of fandom as the world leader in producing "real" Star Trek.
Of course, it probably didn't help when presenter Christopher Jones bowed out around episode 9 and Robert Burnett stepped in - from that point on, many podcasts were just the two of them blustering around, stroking each other's egos and repeating the same old epithets on people they'd attracted to the project: "the Oscar winning X" or "the incredibly talented Y" or "academy award winning Z". Maybe this stuff is just part and parcel of the Hollywood vocabulary (you certainly get it in DVD extras often enough) but it sure gets grating when you hear it plastered on thicker and thicker by AP each week.
The podcast where the writing team sit around and talk for 80 minutes about how great they are and how bad all of the rest of modern Star Trek (both official and fan-made) is an experience like no other(!)
I think the tipping point was probably when they scored it big with their second Kickstarter campaign, giving them undreamed-of piles of cash and spinning the project into a "purely professional fully independent production" and inflating their egos to new levels. However, I haven't bothered to go back and read all of the Axanar website blurb, so it could well have started earlier than that.
AP's ego is truly at the heart of his own troubles and I'm genuinely interested to see what (if anything) Axanar tries next to legally justify their position on this. The beauty of the lawsuit is that it focuses solely on copyright infringement (which all fan films do) and so all of AP's other activities which he might try and use to mitigate his circumstances will likely be deemed irrelevant to the case.
It is like watching a horrific car crash? Possibly. But it is
fascinating.