Hey, I'm not going to try defend Minehut as your opinion here seems pretty firm and you tend to think we're making up excuses when in actuality we're not, but everyone is entitled to their opinions. We hope for Minehut to improve as time goes on for our playerbase, as both Mod and active community member and user of Minehut I can understand that there's frustration with the amount of lag/downtime happening. It's not ideal for anyone.
Also, vanilla entities in Minecraft despawn in 5 minutes, if you haven't reached your items by then it could explain why they despawned. If you want your items to not drop when you die simply type "/gamerule keepInventory true" and this will disable items dropping on death.