this is what i was getting at before the guy came with his canned "making AI images is hard" speech. no shit, dude!
i know it's hard! but the point is, once you get your workflow dialed in, it doesn't get magically HARDER. unknowns become known, weights become standardized, the dev gets better at doing cleanup in photoshop, etc.
so why does it take longer and longer and longer as it goes?
one reason is the dev choosing more and more complicated scenes (like the club scene, with lots of photoshopping required). but that's a creative choice, the dev doesn't HAVE to do that. in fact i'm fairly sure that was a lot of people's least favorite chapter because of how fragmented it was. but a scene like this every once in a while is fun, i think.
the other reason feels more obvious: dev is enjoying spending his patreon money and isn't working as hard. this is supported anecdotally by the dev being less communicative with each release, and the dozens of examples of this happening with other games.
i'm not a cruel patreon taskmaster, i wouldn't give a shit if the dev took a month off to have fun and go on vacation. look at moonripple lake, that dev is the gold standard for reasonable delay communication. what bothers me and others is the insistence that everything is 100x harder than it is and everyone is working 100x than they are. c'mon. we can see what is happening: things are slowing down considerably. it's insulting to be told it's not, especially when you are giving money to support it (which i no longer am, btw, i quit subbing after chapter 4)