To be fair, FD's development changed because Patreon users voted for it to change multiple times when polls were created. A huge part of this is because of those funding the game on Patreon opted for it, at least a statistical majority. There was also some influence from parties who were going to financially back the project that seem to have fallen through as Helius moved away from them and they seemed to have been the initial influence of online portions, etc., that have since evolved. Some decisions have been directed, by Helius, of course, but the core onus is definitely on its supporters who chose this route.
The bigger issue with FD is Helius is incompetent and, clearly, has poor programming habits that are prone to errors. Further, Helius basically refuses outright to hire additional programmers similar to the gross incompetence displayed over on Virt-A-Mate's development by developer Mesh. After all, why rush progress along by hiring real competent programmers to assist you when you can slow development and soak up those sweet Patreon subscriptions. If you think Helius is bad here you should look at some of the shit Mesh does. Helius has nothing on him. Anyways, this creates regularly catastrophic buggy updates that takes a couple of days to weeks to fix each time, slows development in general, and means he has to cut out developing other aspects of the game like the campaign to focus on one thing at a time as a one many wannabe (joke) development army rather than stepping back and acting as a designer/lead role with a programmer force employed under him. Oh, and Helius likes to troll and provide unclear information, change stuff at the last minute, or outright lie and bait for subscriptions like the Galatea stuff.
Some things like the UE5 upgrades or engine overhaul, which is still a joke as high end GPUs are literally incapable of coming even remotely close to being fully utilized at native 4K (aka without upscaling) because the game chokes on CPU utilization on the most powerful CPUs more than super computers running simulations, were definitely necessary. Maybe one day we can use more than 40% of a RTX 4090 in the game... Still, it is better than the disaster it was before and it needed the visual improvements as the game looks much better than it did 2 years ago where other projects are looking quite dated in this rather dried up adult game scene where most of the interesting projects were abandoned and the ones left look like they might only finish after we all die of old age like VAM, FD, etc.
I can't comment on WL as I don't care for furries so I'll leave you all to debate that one.
