I'm not biased, i already invested 544,50€ in L&P work, i'm in the legendary tier long ago, and i think he's slow, he is an artist, not a developer, not a director, nor a business focused man. Beautiful rich detailed renders, narrative and imaginative history, which is a piece of art on itself. Yes, but he won't delegate work, it's a control obsessive one, and he's going to burn down, which will be sad, as i like his work.
I'm also part of renpy development supporters, and i'm not entirely sure in the current state RenPy is able to handle such huge monolithyc files, gigabytes in an archive... It's gonna end weighting more than the entire Cyberpunk2077 game. With practically no modularity...
As many of us know, it's his baby, it lacks planning, it's not resource efficient, nor bussines oriented, in development you try to split the proyect into small working pieces, many of them, that you develop, and stitch together then you push to alpha, lots of little pices (iterations) that can be split over a working team, of designers, and coders, translation, accountings, etc...
And you take in account the cashflow, where does the money come, where does it spend, what's your return of investment in mid time. I'ts intelligent to spend xxxx money on a render farm to batch render production?, or invest in hardware and build inhouse render servers?... Add code and code in a linear way until it breaks, or contract a sofware architect that helps you build the motor for your proyect, how you use your resources, etc. That's a business baseplan.
Being worried if you should apply a 3500 kelvin light or a 5000k light source so it's more "cinematic", and pack of NPCs a restaurant up to detailing the cutlery 6 desk appart from your MC wich the boke (blur) of the camera won't show. It's more in the line of an art director than a game developer. Yeah, you have a window in one render, build a friggin forest with 10thousand trees, squirrels and birds, 11 textures for the leaves, and render that shit for a 3cm window in a fixed angle view onto 1 still render... "It takes time to render", shit, yeah. Use a fucking photo, and crop it to size... Focus on what the camera has to show, just what your eye can see...
And Man, it's a visual novel, if you keep splitting and adding options it's gonna become an openworld RPG...