it comes down to "was it worth it?"
if the dev spends an extra month on an extremely expensive (in terms of development time) group dance scene... well, that dance scene better be pretty amazing, you know? because otherwise... it was a waste.
AI is notoriously bad at handling certain types of scenes, like cramming multiple people into a since scene. a smart dev might actually choose to write a story that plays to the AI's strengths, and focus the story more on 1-on-1 interactions, instead of giant orgies.
quality can't be objectively quantified, it's up to personal taste. development time CAN be measured, and i think it's useful to do so. it is very, very rare for development times to get FASTER as they go, as others have pointed out.
to me, the every-2-months releases felt appropriate for the content that was being released. if the tradeoff for "more group scenes" is "3-4 months development time instead of 2," that's definitely not a good trade in my opinion.
You're right about AI being bad at handling certain types of scenes or even poses. However, luckily, there are ways around that if you're experienced with it. It mainly involves a lot of photoshop, doing cutouts, manually drawing things, adding shadows, ect... The thing is, most people like group scenes, especially within this genre. Every update is better than the last and seems to be increasing in size. It's hard to find a sweet spot, but Circle has never let us down and I don't expect him to let us down in the future. As a friend, he's incredibly talented with how he makes his scenes and how he presents the images to the audience.
Most people don't care about how they are presented, whether the images make sense, whether they have good quality control and consistency, but there's those who do, including myself.
In the end, for most game developers who use AI, the game is AI. With this game, AI is simply a tool to produce images, everything else is hand-made or hand crafted. Every image is touched up, edited or redrawn.
We're not that far away from the update now and I'm sure it'll blow everyone out of the water!
