It's to bad the dev is shelving the game, and I hope that it's temporary as this has a ton of potential. I understand the choice to discontinue though as assets quickly become expensive in both time and money. Single person developers are at a huge disadvantage in the gaming industry especially when their skill set is spread over the whole pipeline of development to marketing. I think alot of the boohoo's from individuals have likely never rendered an image on daz, blender, or any other program and have never attempted to set up a whole scene with all the pertinent assets, or spent time figuring out how costly the hardware (or renting cloud services) is to get anything that is good in a time frame that is decent.
As someone who has worked with daz and other 3D modelling packages and has worked in CAD development for years (as well as "game design" in the form of Mods and level packs in the late 90's through the early 2000's on UE), a lot of this is over estimating basic VN development, specifically a renpy package. Yes, it takes time to pose the models (specially if you don't have a 3D mouse like an orb or space mouse, the posing control can be frustrating if you don't use pre-canned poses), get the lighting right (which this Dev has done fairly well), do the programming etc. But don't confuse VN development with full game development, they are two *very* different things. Renpy at it's most basic core is a slideshow program, this isn't real-time rendered, and sure some Renpy games can get stupid in depth with various "systems" regarding points etc, but this isn't the same as the guy who made Manorlord.
Now, don't get me wrong, making a quality VN with renpy isn't some cake walk or to be disregarded, but most assets are free (look at this site and you'll find most of the models/assets etc for download) and if you do pay for some models or environments, they're actually fairly low price.
I understand trying to get a VN made can *really* take a LOT away from your normal day-to-day, but to render using daz doesn't require cloud processing, or anything really *that* high in processing power, I have an old I7 dual core with 32gb ram and a 2070 that I use for test renders and goofing around with then my lap top also does some renders and my music production (3060 GPU, I7 with 64gb ram) and of course my main rig which is used for everything else (I7 with 64gb and 3090 O/C). But I've seen other VN's made by people who worked with systems older than my dual core rig, it just takes more time and patience to push out the renders.
I hope this dev reconsiders stopping development, it's unique and good character development (A bit cliche, but still entertaining). Support isn't going to magically just happen, in fact I didn't even *know* about this VN until I saw the latest update on the "most recent" tab the other day. If the quality is good, don't worry about how much time it takes, support will come if the story, renders and writing is solid enough.