JoeBanks, why don't you do an intermediate release where you work on some of the earlier walls of text? I know it's in the plans for much later but it you have time waiting for artwork, that bit of recoding could get started.
So this isn't a terrible idea, there are people, and I hope I am right in assuming this, that play our game for more than sex (if you don't I have no clue why you continue on). For them, I have thought how to breach this divide. Sure, I can make another release between here and there and players are happier, but are supporters?
What happens next is additional stress on the team, they don't like the short cycles, we are at each other's throats. I wish the simple answer was, "Yeah, we could do that.", but long term, I don't think for the team as a whole it's a good idea to induce this stress.
From a player perspective, I truly get it, fuck off, more sex, make it simpler... wtf?! But from ours, it's not the same goal and maybe we are wrong for that, but I do want to be able to finish the game if it takes, say five years as noted above. To do that, you don't want people to hate each other. It's really easy to become a toxic dev team that can't work together, trust me.
Lastly, I will talk about it more with the team, doing an FT (field test) release during interim phases, but there's a lot of reasons not to as well, it's a hard sell.