People are acting like its a scam cause thats how Patreon is. You avoid making any real progress because the longer your project goes the more money you milk from your fanbase. It builds laziness into its system as profit, think American construction companies.
I know his and your comments aren't directly targeted at me, but while a developer milking a project is certainly a concern of mine (it's why I stopped supporting stuff through Patreon in the first place), my problem is with how these games never advance past being more than a tutorial or a prologue. What is well known around as the infamous "v0.01" that we see get flooded here every week, and very often never see a numerical increase. I know people have lives and stuff, but it feels like whenever someone starts a new NSFW project, they do the bare minimum to start the project, and then immediately abandoned it, irregardless of their intentions.
Whenever your starting something new, that is broad in scope, establishing the groundwork of that project is almost always the hardest and most time consuming part. After that, things "should" flow a lot more naturally and quicker, because you have your thoughts gathered and in theory, all your stuff setup. Obviously, programming is a slippery slope, but that's mostly the fault of a digital engine.
However, it sounds like a lot of these developers drop these concepts on us, then ask for money with promises of a lot of effort involved... then immediately only put like, an hour per day/week to work on it, whether or not they were intending to milk it for money. I can't even imagine that their making a lot of money, milking a project that's barely a tutorial. If anything, they should at least finish a larger part of the game before attempting that.
As a fan of unique stuff like Kinokogari, it's just very frustrating to experience, and know that the ship is sinking, with no way for you to hold it afloat, even if you were willing to personally throw hundreds of dollars at the project.