Alright folks, here's some food for thought.
So, first things first...
The update consists of 486 total renders, including animations. Animations make for 144 renders, which leaves us with 342 static renders. 342 renders and 4 animations in 9 1/2 months is laughable at best, and realistically speaking it's a complete joke. Stoper has created roughly 1.6 renders per day.
That alone makes me question many different things, but one that is really sticking out is a comment from stoper the morning before release, where he mentioned that he had "added a couple more images this morning". How is he able to casually add several images in the morning hours, but during the whole 9 1/2 months of development, he can barely create more than ONE render throughout an entire workday? (Keep that in mind for the following, as it might make more sense here in just a second)
So with that, I noticed something else which I find quite interesting to say the least. Y'all remember the development blog from September 28th? This particular development blog had a render attached to it, as is the case for most of stoper's devblogs. This render shows a Dartboard, and this exact same render is also part of the update. Now, what's so interesting about that you might ask? Well, if you take a closer look at the game's image folder, you'll notice that these Dartboard renders do appear during the last event at around render number ~230 out of 486 (give or take), Which is pretty close to the halfway point of this entire update. What I'm getting at is, if we were to assume that these Dartboard renders were made pretty much at the same time the September 28th devblog got published, it would mean that stoper added roughly ~260 more renders from the 28th of September to the day of release, November 15th. That again would mean he's been creating more than 50% of the ENTIRE update in about 5-6 weeks (I'm saying 5-6 because the last ~2 weeks were used for script, writing, testing and whatnot). And that brings me to my actual point.
Is it possible that stoper was getting the second half of the update done in just over a month, while the first half of this update took him more than 8 months? I know there's rumours about stoper not actually working for several months at the beginning of a development cycle, and this would certainly reinforce these theories. Now, many people would probably say how that's just a stupid coincidence and doesn't mean anything, but look back at my second paragraph and why I said to keep that in mind. Also, there is another development blog from September 8th, which shows a kitchen table with cake and milkshake on it. This was used at the very end of the 'Heather event' and is completely in line and the right order with the Dartboard devblog from the 28th of September.
I believe all the devblogs with the delays, deadlines, "more routes" and whatnot were just a complete hoax. By the way, where are all those different routes he was working on? The player has very limited options, some of which even end a scene early, another has a slightly different outcome. Where is all this extra work, branches, routes... all the nonsense stoper's been talking about for MONTHS? What happened to this super epic custom beach scenery he's been "working" on for so long? We barely even see any of it. And the parts we do see are premade assets with maybe a couple objects moved around, added or removed.
So, if you ask me, I think stoper has barely done any work in the first ~7 months of this development cycle. Call me crazy if you want. Peace!