I agree with Squark, there has been a lot of evidence in the past and even today that he's more on the "Doesnt care" side, deliberately forcing people to deal with that grind and having to start all over again from scratch every few minor updates. Honestly the only time in which things got sort of justifiable on a save wipe aspect was when they changed a few big core aspects of the game like there were:
- The renaming of the base game process from Radiant to OBF.
- Totally changing the capturing of nephs system and introduction of trait levels and world level as well.
But even then I would still argue that you could work around that issue by bringing something to be able to at least import some non recreatable features like the nephs you have captured or breeded.... With the blending colors system it's almost impossible to get the same neph twice even if you pair two of the same type in the same way under similar conditions, suposing you're lucky enough to capture two of the same type. Tho I guess in the end, the dev is the way he is; Has a lot of biases towards many things but is so unwilling to have their fanbase to enjoy for real his already funneled game unless he's threatened. Remember back then when the "imma lazy sack" cheat was always confirmed with a "Your mother would be so proud"? Like mocking you for not being willing to put up with the stupid grind he came up with and never giving a single fuck about their fans feels about it until enough of them started to go publically against him forcing him to change that to a dummy "success" or else.
Seriously I can understand games every big ass updates requiring some kind of restart of the game progress with a fresh new save but even then the devs try to make the saves to be able to be imported or converted somehow cause people spend hours sometimes of progress to having to start from the very begining again, those cases are rare but in this game is all, the, fukin, time. And if we were talking about a game you could speedrun it would be fine but no, is a game that you're forced to cheat to get to the endgame content without weeks of gameplay, but if you cheat you either skip the game's meat as a whole and also get sort of mocked by it or have to memorize the hell out of how to find the constrictedly optimal way of playing like if this is Dark Souls IV Breeders of the Nephelym (Which btw is one of the few actual games the dev plays, just saying).
I have been playing this game for too long but I was hoping that finally with the change from Radiant to OBF the save wipes would stop but they didnt, and the change that happened to the game from .7 to .8 WAS NOT ENOUGH AT ALL TO JUSTIFY A SAFE WIPE. He added and removed dick physics in the past without a safe wipe, he did bugfixes in the past without a safe wipe, he totally retweaked things on the preset systems without requiring a safe wipe and most importantly. And the worst of all, he's still doing it in a way that for some illogical fuckupness the new saves on new game versions DO LOAD in previous games, but not the opposite which to me it only makes any sense at all if the dev deliberately made things that way on porpouse.