I finished was what done in the master path, seeing as this has been a 4 year long project, I've got to say that I feel like I could have done what the dev did in a grand total of 1 week and I have 0 experience with game development. If this is what I get on my first day being the result for 4 years worth of content, then this is extremely shit
"i have 0 experience with game development" is probably why you think this way
there are certainly developers who just want to drag out development for as long as possible, but more often than not, the slowdown is due to poor planning
with game development, and especially this style of html game, the further is you get, the more you have to juggle
i have dabbled in the past with using sugarcube and the like, mostly to mess with existing games, and i can tell you that the way the flags and pathing is set up is *not* conducive to anything outside of a linear story with branching decisions
every scene has to be written in its entirety for every potential variable, then basically noted in or out depending on the flags that are set (ie if you have met someone there would be a $someone_met flag that lets you see additional text), which is not bad until you make the game non-linear
entirely different branches like the master or enslavement routes are actually easier in this respect, since they can follow their own progression, albeit with their own writing and flags
but as those route grow with length and complexity, so to does the amount of work increase exponentially
for example, take sleeping at night, since that is something you do throughout the entirety of the game
with every transformation that occurs that influences dreams, you have to edit the main "sleeping" scene with more text and more variables to account for it, bloating the size of the scene and making it increasingly difficult to bugfix
if you are organized and know what you are doing from the start, this can be easily mitigated as you can keep a list of variables and have them adhere to a self consistent logic, but fail to keep organized, or add things as you go, and this can very quickly pile up, doubly so if you want to avoid breaking old saves
im not defending the developer for taking their time, as i dont know them or their circumstances, but i am asking you to not sound like a supreme court justice on the topic of cloud computing (iykyk)