(...)Considering that you also have a full time job that most likely pays well and you enjoy, you'd probably be able to hire a coder part time/outsource to a country with lower wages. What makes this game special is the writing and the art. (...)
Interesting notion, but not viable for two reasons: 1: coding is a small part of the process, somewhere in the area of 10% or thereabouts I reckon, and 2: outsourcing is more likely to add time than save it.
The thing to keep in mind about ren'py as a framework is that it handles a ton of stuff out of the box. If you have 5 images laying around, you can have VN with a five image dialog up and finished in 5 mins tops, from scratch.
The actual coding-coding part for LomL is about less than 1% of the overall coding work; it's doing the stuff that ren'py doesn't handle, which is almost nothing. Coming from a developer background myself, I handle that in quarter of the time it'd take to explain to someone.
The not-really-coding-coding part (handling conditionals in dialogs, writing the graphic transforms in ATL (renpy proprietary)), those I consider part of the creative process.
The conditional dialog flows usually comes up as I'm writing the scene, and documenting requirements, carving up dialog and making flows and parcelling that up sending that off, then reviewing that, it takes time. Revisions or new ideas (that usually come at a whim as I run though the scene, or later) will mean going through that process again. The end result is tremendously more tedious effort at no gain and likely to result in less revision and improvement.
The other part (ren'py proprietary ATL) is again part of the creative process, as I'm adding images into dialog, the ebb and flow of the scene sort of make me decide that I want some camera zoom or pan here or there, add an effect of some sort, etc. I'm basically applying them as I play the scene, adjusting and changing and iterating on the effects and the timing, and building on the effects that came before, until it feels right. I wouldn't even know how to begin documenting that, it'd be a shared desktop effort, so also no gain.
Bottom line: getting a coder involved is interesting when you're a) scaling up, and plan to end up with 10 coders if things go well or b) don't know how to code. Neither applies to me.