A question: Why did the team go through Kickstarter instead of something like Indiegogo? IMO expecting to raise $120,000 for a project pretty much every other computer nerd I know passes off as having no chance of ever being functional was suicide for Thorium. Kickstarter is all-or-nothing, Indiegogo would at least allow the devs to still keep most of what money was actually raised, plus Indiegogo doesn't revolve around developing commercial products the way Kickstarter does. It seems Indiegogo tends to be the preferred site for nonprofits and fundraisers, which might be a better match for ReactOS's goals than Kickstarter. Plus, openly saying "This is a fundraiser for X and Y feature in ReactOS, the open-source Windows clone!" sounds more upfront and less shady to non-fanboys than "Hello, I am from Russia, give us your money, we make cloud computing company with your money using half-working operating system, you'll benefit from improved ReactOS, we promise." (The only way it would sound even more shady to someone unfamiliar with ReactOS is if the project head was Nigerian.)
Not that I think fireball is a scam artist or anything (he has my utmost respect), but most people I know think of the Russian mob, vodka, and Putin wrestling bears when they think of Russia, not a hotbed of damn good programmers. Of course, I'm American, too, so...
I really do think the disconnect between the service offered (Thorium) and the stated intention (improving ReactOS) deterred anyone besides existing ReactOS fans who already trusted fireball and Steve Edwards from jumping behind it. If I were unfamiliar with ReactOS and saw the Thorium fundraiser, I'd probably try ReactOS, see that it still acts like an alpha-build OS, and then get sketched out over why some dudes are trying to sell a broken operating system to people, almost like dudes that sell ReactOS discs on Ebay.
Even using the total that was pledged for Thorium as a reference to how much future fundraisers could raise is problematic, simply because there's no way in telling who actually pledged to fund it and who pledged just because, with no expectation of the target amount being met and having to pay up.