Agreed. I get the desire to get money flowing ASAP, but it does a game no good at all if the Dev spends months in public view just figuring out the basics. People will skip right over it.
IMO, the game What A Legend did an awesome job of launching and it's part of why it became so successful so quickly. The first version was already a well-formed game with plenty of content and now they've got more than 10x the supporters this game does.
That game was done by a husband and wife team I think if I remember? They had good coordination and could micro-manage the development together very well. Even hiring another person to help wouldn't have been as perfect as having a spouse to do the work on the game development.
They took their time releasing it till substantial enough wetting people's appetites, and it was initially fulfilling. Majority of people don't play visual novels for saucy slow sexually explicit romance. Stick to text-based games or taboo romance novels.
So many games with this genre competing in an over-saturated market with a fringe fetish means singling out those Patreon subscribers to your pet project. That's like trying to find a habitable planet with Kepler kind of undertaking.
Teasing sexual innuendo six months later after initial release isn't going to do you any good, and might drive away the majority of people to fund more better abundant and developed games with this genre.
But even with all the flaws this game in development has, it might still turn out decent in time. If he doesn't get discouraged due to slow Patreon growth. This game might actually end up the "The Tortoise and the Hare" scenario in due time.