Well, to some point i trust him... thats it. Of course he could lie his ass off all the time, what do i know about that? But if i would approach everything in life like that... well, bullet to the head would be a better idea i guess.
DPC made some posts like that a long time ago, some in discord, some on patreon, where he said that the maingirl paths and endings are already planned out beforehand, same goes for the mainplots (where we can argue which is mainplot and what not) I tend to believe him there and considered how things out of earlier episodes appear again later on its kind of obvious he did planned that way before.
"Trust" is a difficult thing, it has to be earned, especially if we are talking about DEVs on F95 games around here... lets face it, 99% of them are liars.
You can accuse DPC of many things (again, i said it, he is in general a prick) but flat out lying about the game and how he approached it? Nah, not so far.
We all know the excuses many devs give "my cat died, my dog has eaten the dead cat is dying know too because of the disease you get from eating cats, so... yeah release will not be october, it will be next month" next month... "ah i had technical issues, so yeah... not gonna happen" and so on and on and on. There is not much to be trusted about when a DEV starts giving ETAs and has one excuse after another without ever making his ETA in the first place. And ETAs are only one example... some others talk much about "going fulltime" and well, the amount of content they are creating for a release could be done in one month if they really would work 8 hours a day.... all that you cant say about DPC. So... all in all, DPC is a prick, but i wouldnt say a liar, and he has no reason to lie about the fact that he has a overall storyboard for the game from start to end for the main-parts. And that he wanted to do 16 epsiodes wasnt mentioned by him only once, but several times, why say it when he doesnt want to? No reason for that. Last time he kinda "underlined" it was with the interlude, and before the interlude he talked a lot about his work and how he has done it in the past... but that he has to change it cause he cant go on like that cause he was near a burn out.
But nontheless, he is pretty much the only DEV on F95 who makes weekly DEV reports, who else does that? And we get serious and correct numbers along the way too, who else does that? I wish he would give us more numbers, he clearly could give us some numbers now, but i guess... those numbers arent that impressive yet, so he waits for it.
If he would lie flat out about some important things, this trust is down the drain forever... so far he didnt gave a reason for that. To be sceptical or suspicious is ok, but just cause a DEV tells us something and than to think "well, i dont buy it could be shit-talk" is kinda a difficult appraoch to handle things dont you think? I would say... innocent until proven guilty and until than, i trust his word, even if it was years ago. But of course you can call that "knowledge" or that i KNOW things... but, well, thats kinda counting peas in my book.
But 99% of the DEVs around here are indeed already guilty, and i dont believe a single word from those DEVs... and i will never understand people who still throw money to them. The numbers of DEVs who i think can be trusted so far is really really small. Maybe... 10? Not more. At this date, i support 4 of them. DPC is not one of them by the way... but the reason is easy. The DEVs i support give the updates out for "small" supporters too, so i can get a update for about 10 bucks... Thats not the case with DPC, so i pay when and update comes out for one time... and thats it. But its support too i guess? Just not during the dev cycle.
