A rant on timeouts

My first correspondence chess tournament ended. Although I placed second out of four, I am not happy with it. This is not because I lost two of the six games (in fact, I am happy that I won a few games at all in my first tournament), but because one player lost all his games by timeouts. I can perfectly understand that people get over the time limit in "live" games, where you have only minutes or even seconds to make a move. I can also understand, that something can happen within the multiple weeks that are needed to complete a correspondence chess game. Nevertheless, I think that people who sign up for a tournament should take their commitment seriously. ChessWorld even offers the opportunity to mark time slots as vacation, to prevent timeouts when people are unable to move for one reason or another. If someone does not intend to finish a game, the person could at least contact his/her opponents and tell them about it. But simply not responding anymore is like leaving for a smoke in an over-the-board game and never coming back - it is simply inpolite and makes me, as the winner of these games feel bad about the winning these games - I'd rather loose an exciting battle than to win by timeout!