Dare to dream a little, do you really understand how slow 4 months of development is? If we get 3 updates a year, that's only one in-game day. It will literally take a decade and a half to finish the game at that rate.
For us to have any hope of this game reaching completion, updates have to average something like 90 days. That means we need some that can be done in 75 days, and some longer ones that need 120 days. At minimum, there should be four updates in a 12 month span. That isn't asking a lot, I swear it isn't. Compromises will need to be made, but I'm sure we can maintain quality renders even if there are just fewer of them. Let's assume we average 90 day development cycles; accounting for testing and other preparations, maybe that leaves 75 days of rendering. If L&P can hold tight to 400 renders per update, that would mean that he would have to produce a little over 5 renders a day to meet the 400 renders in 75 days threshold. This seems like a very doable benchmark. This threshold would be about 1,200 renders for an entire in-game day.
More than likely though, I think L&P is going to need to reconsider the 30 playable days idea. It's just going to take too long, even if L&P gets the average development cycle down to 90 days. He may want to consider not only time skips, but montages to help advance the story.
There's about 3 or 4 devs making as good looking renders but the style would have to be the same and there has to be sharing of character assets, so I understand L&Ps point here of being too difficult to find someone, teach them the same style and then fully trust them that they wont just go and fork the story for monetary gain by developing a fuckfest on the side.
So that leaves him with the option of getting people to work on sketches of the scenes, props, items, environments, clothing of the next version so when the time to develop comes he already knows what he's going to use.
It's simple and eases up a lot of the burden if you're developing/rendering and thinking of what to use on the fly or what might look good on the scene you're creating atm, basically it eliminates the "what If I try this in this scene?".
A quick and easy way of easing up his workload would be to share with 2nd guy what the next version's history going to be and your vision of the scenes, that's a 4h call.
2nd guy takes notes and goes to the board, renders it and keeps sending next version's screenshots (not of full scene renders with characters, but environment renders and assets such as clothing/shaping/surfaces/meshes examples), and all L&P needs to do is say what he thinks about it. Then do a weekly call to touch base about the next version and whats the status of the proposed assets .
Once he wraps up the actual version he already has the next version all thought and organized in terms of environment assets and clothing/shaping/surfaces/meshes.
4hr call again to discuss next version with 2nd guy and another cycle begins.
Basically he doesn't even need a pro in Daz because it would be L&P making the scenes, he would just have all the work lined up for him according to his directons but done by someone else.
After a few versions 2nd guy is already in line with what L&P is looking for and the process will just get better. It can even reach a point where the environment comes like 90% done and then its just characters/posing/cameras/lights left which will bring the render average from 5 to at least double, as I'm guessing giving life to a base environment set is what takes most of the time in the dev cycle L&P has per scene.
His photoshop editing, the same. Plenty of people out there that could be editing the renders in batches as they come.
For dialogue I'll reserve any kind of suggestions as I dont know if L&P is making the full dialogue, before he goes rendering or after.