In my opinion, the main drawback of the episode, no matter how banal it sounds, is a long time of development. Nothing has hurt the game so much as a long wait, hundreds of thousands of lines of theories and player fatigue.
Therefore, DPC was faced mainly with a cool response and not such a large increase in subscribers to the patreon as it was after episode 8. In order for this episode to work, he needs to release episode 10 as soon as possible, and preferably in the summer. At least there are several reasons to think so:
1) he stopped making custom renders and, according to him, saved 10% of the time
2) in episode 10 there will be fewer freeroams that devoured most of the development due to complex code and complex renders with a large number of objects in the scene.
I would be very, very surprised if episode 10 comes out again in the fall, because there are no objective reasons for this.