Very true, 99.9% of the patrons and the gallery surely give not a damn about the "rewards", gumdrop is rewarding himself with more money. Actually this one reason I chose "Donnerwetter" as a song for him, because while the singer goes on about how great he and his comrades are in the end you see clearly they are only lazy lechers, taking the job only for the money and women.The funniest part is how he adds "rewards" that I bet nobody gives a flying fuck about except himself (because they are very convenient excuses). It's like he knows it and he wants to justify his extremely slow progress by pushing the idea that people are getting something in return, to please the masses. It would be like facebook constantly reminding its users that their service is free in giant banners, so as to occlude any criticism of their questionable practices (like the massive amounts of data they harvest).
These "rewards" are only rewards for himself, since I can bet most of his patrons are unaffected by them in any meaningful sense, while he gains a fantastic excuse to delay the game's development even more, or to justify his slow progress.
The only bottleneck gumdrop can have with his supposed hardware is his laziness. Heck, you can churn out great renders even without(!) a GPU card. For a test, I installed Daz, put it on 1920 dpi, filled the pic with two persons and many props to get Hotel load and rendered it with just CPU and internal GPU. Took 20 minutes, with my totally unspecialised home pc. Gumdrop supposedly has render specific hardware PC, several in fact. No way in hell or paradise that he has a render bottleneck.As a side note, I'm 80% sure he is being purposely misleading about how he uses his hardware; plenty of other devs also render very slow scenes like sunsets consistently. And many of those even have full blown animations. I'm not 100% sure because I don't have a top graphic card, but he claims to have several of them. If he was not happy with the renders and he was doing a lot of rerendering he should be honest about it. That his bottleneck is the hardware is starting to be laughable. He would have to be a total noob on Iray to get such massive bottlenecks with his supposed hardware.