There's a boatload of content in the game and enough replayability that it rivals extremely popular indie/AAA games.
Even if Vrel decided to stop development, DoL is big enough that I wouldn't blame them. Furthermore, it's not just Vrel working on it. Someone else would probably take the torch if Vrel let them.
There's so much stuff in the game part of its unreasonable difficulty indirectly comes from that(although most of it is bad design and poor balancing, of course). it's often impossible to tell which skills and activities are relevant and even important at all, and many of these co-dependencies and connections are not logical, so you can only discover them by poking the game for hours and days with no hints.
Which wouldn't be such a problem, had the game not been balanced so poorly you would often end up with no reward or even a punishment for your efforts. A new player gets completely annihilated by the RNG and all the nonsense, while a veteran player abuses the systems just because he knows them. So who is the game's 100% difficulty balanced around? Probably no one.
Look at two school events everyone will run into. Principal's password random event - 5000 pounds payout earned in 15 clicks, possibly on day 1. Science fair event - requires either weeks of grinding skills and/or exploration, amounting to hours of gameplay - 700 pounds. Is that well balanced? Absolutely not.
Anyone who says the unfairness is the point will be repeatedly hit with defecation-inducing rays. Just because you like bad game design doesn't make it a good design.
The game desperately needs not new features, but a balance rework. The basic difficulty has long since ceased to be a problem to the old players, so you can lower it a bit for the new players without completely robbing them of feats. The extortions and encounter frequencies are hilariously high on 100% for how hard it is for a new player to figure out a way to make money with so many things they could do.
The rewards for events need a rework that makes payouts more reasonable for their time investment. More areas and activities should be locked from the start and unlock later to avoid overwhelming players so much, it's worse than coming back to WoW right now.
And there definitely needs to be a tiny bit more hand-holding at the start to lead a new player to a way of making enough money to stay afloat and have the time to explore and experiment.
Degrees of Lewdity is a game that already has all the pieces required to make it a great game and even more, they are just put together wrong, ending up in the game's difficulty coming not from genuine complexity of it mechanics, but from pure unadulterated bullshit.