It's like you're looking right at the problem, but you can't tie the the last part of the equation together due to whatever personal bias you have.
Yes. If you were in their shoes, of course you'd like the job to last forever. THEREFORE, why not make it last forever?
And now you know why the game hasn't progressed worth a crap in the last 5 years.
There's something to be said about money and women, but I won't go that far. Anyone above the age of 25 who's had a girlfriend (or at least hung around friends who had girlfriends) can fill in that blank.
I think the explanation that it's a simple scamtreon or Scamstarter is unlickely, else it would have to be the most luckiest and most incompetently managed scam ever. For three simple reasons:
1. Such scams love to have hard to dispute excuses. If no proper content was added they want to sit behind walls of "Added very complicated behind the scenes coding to make development faster/make specific content possible etc.". Liliths throne being open source can't do that. Everyone can see if a months work consists of 3 lines of code.
2. Such scams often give real incentives to patreon subs. Be it early access or scenes or the damn game itself. Liliths throne is again open source, major updates are released to anyone, and the only hurdle to minor updates is installing the JDK.
3. Money comes before anything resembling morals or pride. If Patreon orders you to remove incest, or rape, or an image showing Trotzky, you fucking do that. Bonus points for saying to your fans that you might consider changing sites "In the forseeable future" eg. the heat death of the universe. Innoxia did jump ship immeditaliy instead of censoring the game.
I personally believe it's a creative or project burnout and Innoxia is either lying to herself or to the consumers about her ability/motivation to finish the game.