Even before BlueCat had a team of people working on this, it had a crazy amount of content. I think that with the current team, once they have the base straitened out, the content will come back at the same pace and many of the Patrons who dropped will come back. It sucks for everyone that it is taking this long to clean up the code but they will have a better product at the end.
Given the scope of the game as envisioned, it needs a solid base and things like having a functioning index of characters and a way to make the save system work with the planned merges. Look at all the complaints about Cyberpunk 2077, even large professional studios have difficulties hitting release dates with all the functionality they promised. I think most players understand that and will come back when the release is done.