During the years many users of this forum asked to devs if they needed any help and the answer has always been negative. Once one dev even asked help on patreon so I sent him a message with contacts and references of a skilled programmer who wanted to help him. He never contacted him and the game is still slow.With all this time and effort to make fan arts, why not help the author directly? Does he not want outside help to hasten development?
In many cases slow devs (Stoper, Icstor, ...) they know that even if they keep us waiting for a whole year they still get their fanbase intact without working. Look at Stoper's last update, ridiculous, and it took 1 year of "work".
If, as you said, devs would accept help from users of this forum then they would have no more excuses. There's plenty of skilled people here but hiring one of them would mean they won't be able to lie about deadlines or workload anymore.