Let me clarify things a bit.
1. IQ is mainly Dahr's project. In the sense of storytelling, characters and ideas. Dahr writes the script, draws all the art (a whole lot of really good art, I must say) and plans the stuff which should be included in the game. Dahr is very good and very fast artist who's able to perform crazy amount of work even if he feels really unwell (which, sadly, happens from time to time). A good storyteller too. But he's no programmer. He doesn't know RenPy, especially, to the extent required to bring his ideas to life. And this brings us to...
2. Xaljio. He's a professional software developer. Long time ago he helped Akabur to learn RenPy and participated in his projects. But now Akabur is a one-man band, and Xaljio has his own pet project - Library Story, which he writes, codes and translates himself in collaboration with Latissa who does the art. Also, Xaljio has his main job as, well, a professional software developer. And also he does all the coding for Iris Quest implementing all those dungeon crawling, mini-games and a few types of combat. It scares me to even imagine the thing he did to poor RenPy to achieve that. To the freaking visual novel engine, meant for, well, freaking visual novels! Which brings us to...
3. Ambitions. Dahr and Xaljio wanted to create a game of their dreams. And got a bit carried away in the process. They kept implementing complex mechanics using the engine not very suitable for that. This resulted in crazy amount of work and even crazier amount of testing and bug fixing. But that experience, while being very painful, proved to be quite useful. From now on, we plan to take measures to simplify the development process. No more complex mechanics used in a single quest (see Goblin's Curse). No more intertwining quests. And a lot more usage of RenPy built-in functionality. Etc., etc. Now that we finally have a decent combat engine, we have all required tools to speed up the process. So, let's hope for the best.
4. Could Akabur speed the things up? I think, no. As it was mentioned earlier, he's knee deep in his own projects. In the terms of coding, Xaljio is better than Akabur. In the terms of drawing, Dahr's better. But Akabur could do it all himself, he built quite an efficient process of getting the things done and also he doesn't fight furiously with RenPy engine to bend it to his will. He efficiently uses it's visual novel developing capabilities. With all that, he brought the whole genre of porn games to the shining new heights. Akabur could help us just being an example of how to organize the process properly.
5. Me? I'm just a guy who proofreads Russian text, translates it into English, performs some QA and occasionally comes up with some small ideas for the game. But perhaps, the first part of IQ will include a bit of my code as well. We'll see.
