I can understand why someone might have this opinion if they've never been involved or made a choice-heavy game. But there are lots of reasons it's taking so long and that we're actually lucky to it isn't taking longer. I'll list them off. But needless to say, there's a reason you don't see games like Our Life being made even in big industries, despite how
1. The most important one, GB Lady creates this game virtually all by herself. Literally. She comes up with the ideas, drafts them and writes them. She is at least a quarter involved with the programming process if not more, with the local legend Shauna luckily taking on the remainder of that load. Not to mention that a lot of misspellings are bound to be involved due to the sheer amount of writing.
Luckily, again, this is something she only has to handle partially due to her brother, but she herself still needs to look over her writing and change thing. Then she has to come up with designs for things. Thank God, though, the artists do the heavy lifting for this. With all this being said, it's rare for the creator/director of a game of this scale to do this much and be this involved in practically every aspect.
Then, the sensitivity readers, who actually do very little to nothing and to be extremely brutally frank are actually likely to add to GB's workload than subtract to it, since the input she gets from them and even pays them for can easily come from the minority base of her fandom. However, I imagine she wants some discretion/to avoid spoiling a lot of the game, so it's easy to see why she opted to have them.
2. This is not just any normal 'choices matter' game like we see from hosted games. This is a Visual Novel. You know when we see things like characters blinking, their expressions changing, the speech bubbles, animations around the speech bubbles, leaves falling and raindrops? This is called directing and when performed by just a single individual, it can take up to weeks to complete.
This being said, I think OL2 takes maybe days, a week at max due to helpful tools. OL2 nevertheless still does have way more complex directing than your average Visual Novel does, including OL1. Almost everything you see in the game is layered. The sky, the trees, the bushes, those are separate layers that have to be arranged. This is something else GB Lady has to do all by herself, in order to get across the desired effects and atmosphere.
3. Unlike OL1 almost every single choice you make in OL2 matters in varying extents. Step One of OL2 already has more choices than Step One of OL1, and OL2's Step One isn't even finished yet. This requires a lot of flags and branching, both of which can be difficult to keep track of the longer the game goes on. It takes more than you would think to make the game remember even basic details, like if the MC is left-handed or right-handed. It's a big reason why a lot of Visual Novels go the 'management' or 'point system' route and make your character customizable via that (The Sims, Growing Up, XOXO Droplets, and many, many, more). Most Visual Novels have a 'right' or 'wrong' choice, because it is a lot more sustainable and straightforward to create.
4. Having two concurrent love interests mean double the branching, flags, writing and programming. This, again, is why visual novels with more than one love interest have 'right or wrong' choices, requirements and/or point systems. But as if that's not enough, you don't even have to pursue a romantic relationship with them. You can be friends or neighbors. That triples the amount. Then the dynamics system, even now in Step One, where you can alter just the MC's part of the dynamic, the amount is now quadrupled. Not to mention that the MC's personality is not customized by the dynamics, but individual of the dynamics system. When Step Two officially comes around, progress will be even slower due to the option to also be able to customize Qiu and Tamarack's dynamics. Keep in mind that you also have the option to go from Crush to just Neighbors or vice versa. That makes this game at minimum, seven times longer than OL1. And this is just the stuff that we as players, can see. By the time this game is finished, there will be thousands of potential alterations and at least a million words.
5. MC's family dynamic is more customizable. Which, you guessed it, more drafting, writing, and coding.
6. Lastly, GB Lady, due to player vote through Patreon, now has two mandatory off-days per week. While I think she deserves them, we have to remember that this was not the case with OL1, where she only had off-days per her own choosing (birthdays, sickness, vacations, etc). So now she has her chosen off-days and mandatory ones. Just that by itself makes progress a little slower.
So yes, Late 2025 is a more ambitious goal than GB Lady might realize it is right now. She might reach it, but chances are that Step Two will be just getting finished by that time, or we'll be in the middle of Step Three. Also, if we're following the same pattern as OL1, Step Two moments will be longer than those of Step One. The game, Wedding DLC and all, is likely to be fully finished around Late 2027 or early 2028.
