They're right though. The game is super linear and lacks any actual gameplay loop. It should go down the DoL route by being a battle to get through the story against the corruption and lewdification of your character, balanced around rng elements so you will inevitably lose. It needs more bad ends and more unexpected sandbox content. Zones, especially Dominion, need redesigning around forcing you to travel through danger spots instead of all the safe streets. Randomly generated enemies need to have things like bondage giver fetish and physically put you in items. Enslavement has been waited on forever. And a focus on the player entering a cascading degradation of moral values should occur. Use Trap Quest and DoL for inspiration but really lean in on the randomly generated characters doing a lot more stuff. Apply tattoos. Put the player in items that are cursed that have negative effects. Apply effects that make the player unable to NOT submit to an opponent. Etc etc etc. On top of this make sure to actually create a gameplay loop event (rising rent costs? toll roads/gates that rise over time?) to force the player into requiring larger and larger sums of money just to barely survive, this will actually give the player something to struggle against in the world and make how they end up spending their time a meaningful choice instead of literally just going to your bed and spamming "skip to sunset/skip to sunrise" for several days to skip to an event you want to do.
There's an absolute mountain of stuff that could be explored if the game had a proper gameplay loop to balance around and a vision of what a gameplay loop actually is.
Right now it's a linear visual novel without any visuals. Build it into a struggle against transformation, corruption and moral degradation with proper timelimits as a driving force for the player to use their time wisely and push forwards. Right now it's trying to be way too many things and the answer given is "just RP it" and this mindset results in it failing to be anything but mediocre at a lot of things.
The foundation is fantastic, the fundamental understanding of what a game actually is happens to be what's missing.
If you want a collar so bad, go to Amber and lick her feet until she likes you enough to make you her pet.
This game isn't trying to be like DoL or Trap Quest and it shouldn't. It's trying to emulate Corruption of Champions as that was the main inspiration for it. It just has a somewhat better sex system rather than the always written the same way sex in Corruption of Champions and games like it. The game is about how you handle the world around you and it should remain as such as far as a narrative and mechanical purpose goes. It offers a power fantasy to go with the submissive fantasy, but leaves the choice to the player and it does that part well enough.
Making this game insufferable by making it nigh impossible to succeed is not the answer, though. That's not the kind of game it's trying to be nor should it ever strive to be. That kind of game design is on par with level scaling and really only works on games that are built around stamina runs. This game is trying to be an RPG and it's supposed to show how strong you've gotten as you played along. Inno just can't develop a proper system to convey that.
One of the problems with the game is that Inno doesn't put in the effort to match the amount of time it took to update. They also waste characters like Leotie as a tacked on antagonist and there's no reason you can't visit them in Nyan's apartment... since that seems to be where she stays and is on vacation. You don't get to have any alone time with Leotie to get to know her better. Locking her behind a scheduled time is dumb and Inno should know that. After all, you can fuck the Harpy matriarch whenever you like, but to take her on dates is a weekly thing and makes sense. Dates are supposed to be special. However, you can't fuck Nyan or Leotie whenever you want, you have to wait weekly for it. It's a step back and Inno should know better.
The main problem is that Inno hasn't worked on the main story in forever - just now finally releasing some more of it and it's such a tiny bit - and tries to appease people by adding fluff and changes to mechanics that don't really need it, what fluff is added is fairly shallow because they're rushing it out to show something. They need to focus on the main story and get that written down and done so they don't have to worry about it later. They need to scale back the extras until they're at a comfortable pace. They also need to hire coders to look over their work or code in systems the patrons vote for or Inno wants. This includes all the breeds to various morphs.
Shame you can't rely on writer submissions since that one loser made the Mary Sue character and the drama from that. Spoiled the entire thing for everyone, but Inno can take on coders to work on the mechanics they want in the game. That's easy for them and something they should be doing while they focus on the story.