I think the pacing is fine so far. Remember, we're talking about characters who are dealing with serious issues; Charlotte's suffering from severe trauma from years of sexual abuse and a near-death assault, Emma's suffering from systematic bullying that's affecting her self-confidence and self-worth as well as being very sheltered and too naively innocent for her own good, and Suzi is dealing with a blackmailer who's threatening to release scandalous pictures that could ruin her career and she's also a stuck-up brat. Even Lucy's not without her problems, because aside from taking on some of the burden of both Charlotte and Emma's problems, she's also dealing with her own insecurity of always being in Charlotte's shadow and with having guys get close to her only so they can get close to Charlotte. The MC's also not the most stable person either what with his apparent failure to keep a previous charge safe and it's deeply scarred him.
None of these issues are going to be resolved quickly, therefore progression with these characters and relationships is going to take time, and I think it's progressing well and at a fair pace because having the MC or any of these characters get into all sorts of raunchy, sexy shenanigans so early on just doesn't fit the tone of the story being told and would ruined things if it were to go down this route. This is a story about character building emotional connections with each other, not being vapid vessels of pure lust, and so the story is driving the eventual sex scenes and not the sex driving the story.
I think this developer, so far, is very deserving of the praise they're receiving and I don't see any indication that this is a "milking" game.
For starters, the dev only has 3 subscription tiers; $1, $5, and $10. They currently have 597 patrons, so that means they're earning anything from $597 a month, to close to $6000 a month, and that's before Patreon takes their 30% cut. At the most, it's a decent amount of money, but it's not exactly "f*** you" money or even retirement money, not to mention that they won't have been earning this the whole time.
Secondly, I feel you can tell the difference between a milking game and a serious game. For me, milking games have no story. It's just all about sexual teasing and characters dancing around each other but with no actual plot beyond that. Also, they often feature standards character models, standard set pieces, and stuck-on clothes with no morphs, and even when the renders do look good, it's still just a ploy to draw people in. With serious games, you can tell that a lot more effort has gone into them, particularly when it comes to building the world around the characters and with how much depth the characters have. There's also an underlying story, whether that be something that arcs over all the characters, or it's individual character stories dealing with their own issues and problems to be resolved. So given all that, I'd class this as a serious game.
And finally, this game first released last year and in less than 10 months it's had 7 updates after its initial release. The updates haven't been particularly large in size, ranging from 138 renders in the first release to 359 in the recent update, but there's a lot of quality in each update in terms of the story and the development of these characters and their relationships to each other, so much so that we will likely see the biggest leap forward in the next update with regards to Charlotte and the MC. So, for a new developer, I think they're doing alright so far and setting a good pace. It might be another 2 or even 3 years to reach the end, but if it maintains and even improves on the quality seen so far, it will be one of the best games that's been made.
