Those are mostly different engine remakes though. This is just taking all of the renders and a few fan art images and shoving them together alongside a bit of rewriting.
I agree with you for the most part, but I do think it kind of trivializes what is actually a lot of effort. Each day has on average 900 lines I have to review, edit, and rearrange for continuity. I usually do this process multiple times when I'm integrating a new day for different routes. I've also fixed bugs that have existed for years, added new features, and wrote tools to make the dialogue more dynamic.
But from my perspective, creating the renders is the most time consuming and expensive part, which is why the original developer should be the one benefiting financially. I would love to work with them on the official release and I still might if they ever reach out.
I'm also currently unemployed and I do think the rate at which I've been pushing updates does skew the perception of how much effort it's really taking. I've basically been working on this full-time. We can all thank the US government and my former employer for funding it.
Culture Shock updates have been consistently slow since the game first came out. Nothing about it has ever changed to indicate a "milk mode", the devs just slow and seemingly held back even more by their rendering speed.
I can't comment on the "milking" accusations, but I do have one personal anecdote. I was subscribed to his Patreon during January when he released his latest update. There were a lot of new (and old) bugs that people wanted a patch for. I fixed them in a couple hours and sent him documentation and posted on his Discord. As far as I know, they did nothing with it. At that point, I was getting messaged about an "unofficial" patch so I made a distributable and sent it out to a few people. I even posted the file in his discord. This was an exact copy of his game (none of my changes), except with the bug fixes and updated dependencies (they are using older versions of Python and RenPy in the official release). If they wanted, they could extract the rpa archives and build off it. Again, no response.
I don't know this person's living situation so I try not to be too judgmental about it, but I basically gift-wrapped what his community was asking for. All he had to do was literally share the link, or copy and paste the code from the documentation I sent. It's been almost two months and I'm no longer subscribed to his Patreon, so I have no idea if he finally released a patch or not.
That being said, I would rather people in this thread not shame the original developer. I admire what they've been able to accomplish and I'm hoping that my "rewrite" is a value add to their community.
One of the main reasons I don't want to accept money for this project is because I'm having fun with it and I don't want it to be a job. So if I am forced to stop working on it, all it will mean is that I have more free time. I also don't have to worry about catering to one crowd or the other. I do appreciate the fans of the game that have been really positive about what I'm trying to do, and I understand the concern that if I don't try to "fix it" that no one ever will.
I wish this site had threadmarks because I've said it multiple times, but I did reach out to the mods about this first. Because of how "fast" I was finishing updates, I felt like I was spamming the OG thread, which has relatively low traffic. They discussed it amongst themselves and advised me to make this one. If they decide to take it down in the future, than that is totally fine with me.