Whether Google should've communicated better with Rick is one thing but the fact of the matter is, Rick broke Google's TOS with his adsense in 2 ways.One by encouraging people to click on the ads and secondly by having no real content on the site and really using it basically for adsense alone.
He and others can cry as much as they want but it doesn't concern other webmasters at all.If you want to game Google you have to do it much more subtely than that.
So my advice for Rick and others trying to make a drama out of this is "grow up and move on".
