I've been thinking that it could be something like an ADHD thing. Where they are good at starting stuff and have great ideas but really bad at finishing it.
I can see this. Which is why so many of these projects need a *team* to be successful.
Not everyone is Notch, Scott Cawthon, or Toby Fox. And even *they* have teams to help them out.
I call it the "creativity leash." It's what helps us get things like the star wars original trilogy and prevents things like the 16 year gap before and quality of the prequel trilogy. It gives us Star Trek TOS and prevents situations like TNG seasons 1 and 2.
If you have someone on staff who can and will tell you your idea is complete shit or to stop getting distracted by other things, you're more likely to finish a product. This is why South Park has lasted almost 30 years.
I've even experienced it myself. When I was collaborating with someone else on my fictional universe, we created a TON of content and I was writing a lot. But once we "broke up" progress slowed to a crawl.
With Patreon projects, this can be exacerbated by your audience asking for weirdly specific and weird things that can inevitably distract from and cause burnout. Like, the guy above me who asked about toenails. Hypothetically, what if the author/artist didn't like toenails? But your audience wants toenails, so you feel compelled to do it. And with no one else on your end to say "Ew, toenails?" and build you up to be able to say no...you can end up taking on more weight.
This is what I call a "latex skunk": Something people paying you want in your game, but implementing it would distract from the story you're trying to tell. I named it after the frankly bizarre prevalence in indie fetish game projects that inexplicably have a latex skunk either as a character or a player transformation. Seriously there's like 6 games with latex skunks in them that otherwise don't focus on latex skunks.