Well, there is no sense shooting the messenger. Whatever we think of Bluecat's lack of progress, it isn't Skummy's fault. If he weren't here, we wouldn't have any info at all.
I think while nobody can say what Bluecat's true motivations have been over the last year, the fact that he has been nearly silent the entire time, even on his Patreon, and when he did release a status update, just under the wire to keep the game from being marked abandoned, it was either vague, totally misleading about what was specifically was going on as far as actual game development, or both. I suspect that he just decided to take a break from the game, waiting for Latecomer to complete the merge as an excuse for taking a year+ vacation from game development. Whether Bluecat has the motivation to restart development in January, I guess we will all see pretty quickly one way or the other.
But that is just my guess based on the evidence shown so far, maybe he has a whole load of new content saved up that he has worked on during the last year, just waiting to release, which we will all see shortly, once the merge deadline hits in January.
There are still a few more weeks for the deadline, so I would say it's best to just try to be patient at least until then, until we hear, hopefully, what the new plan is, hopefully with actual release dates, rather than just more "we are working on it, be patient" for the next 6 to 12 months.
I don't know what the new year will bring for ES. It seems like the "put up or shut up" moment for Ecchi Sensei. Either Bluecat will release new content, in some reasonable time frame in 2022, or he won't. Other than a few of his hardcore patrons, which seem to me to have more money than sense at this point, I doubt many of his supporters or those of us hanging around here will stick around for another year of waiting for new content.
