Believe me, that is not farcical, but I think your position is explainable since it more or less the all in approach. I repeat myself here, it is the degree that makes or breaks this. It is one thing to include a scene. character, whatever the fans and you yourself find good and another if you let fans decide on "meta"-stuff, like release dates, general story structure, etc.
The former is hand-in-hand work, the latter is encroaching on your vision, bowing to outside pressure. If you bow once, the vocal fanbois expect that you will do it again if they just yap enough. I am a hobbywriter myself and have stories out, I know quite well to what lengths some fans and "fans" will go.
That's a massive oversimplification. You can't just draw an arbitrary line and declare listening to fans is only good if it's on one side of that line. Listening to fans is good whenever it serves to improve the work, whether it be critiquing a character or the development process. The fact that there's no objective way to quantify what 'improves' a work is exactly why taking feedback is so tricky.
You worry entirely about the fans becoming entitled if they think Eva will listen to them, but you completely ignore the risk that by releasing a half update now the fans will feel entitled to future content updates at a faster pace than Eva can deliver them. That, IMHO is the far more pressing risk here because, again, Eva is so obviously struggling to write this game.
It is neither farcical nor do I have a wrong read, I am writing myself and have seen what a span of behaviour the fans and critics have.(And how onesided some fans unfortunately think, there is a reason I mentioned a TTRPG here)
You are argumenting as if Eva writes a book, not a game. Narrative cohesion is important, but when you make a game with patrons hanging on your neck, it is an unfortunate fact of life that you should release in steady or at least halfway steady intervals!
And releasing one part in two is no problem for cohesion, if your next part is released "whole" again. What you (it is quite clear what you voted for considering your post) and the others voted for has hurt Eva´s outside image, which is important too! What potential patron sitting on the fence is comitting to a game where the last new stuff is already a year old?
Had Eva released the Ian part, it would have shown that the game lives and releases are somewhat steady. But now? Anybody stumbling on ORS now will see a stalled game with new stuff "back in antiquie times" and this coma going on for longer.
Nonsense. I'm sorry to keep beating this drum, but the problem is that Eva herself is obviously burned out.
If Eva had framed the release of Ian's half as something she was enthusiastic about - that she'd come to realize it would be better to have a pause between the two halves of the chapter and as a happy side effect our wait would be half as long - that would have changed everything. Not only would she never have put the release up for a vote, but I venture to say such a vote would have handily swung around to favoring the partial release. There would still be naysayers, of course, but most people would have trusted Eva.
But Eva didn't do that. She made it painfully clear that she was only releasing Ian's half because she felt the full episode wasn't worth the wait and she couldn't think of any other way to get something out of the door now. No wonder people didn't have much faith in the artistic integrity of the partial release after that. I think the majority of fans were trying to reassure Eva that her work
was worth waiting for, which strikes me as a hell of a lot more productive than taking the handout and running would have been.
You clearly disagree and I respect that, but I think you're letting your own preference blind you to the pitfalls of the half release path. We had to choose between two bad options here; there are plusses and minuses to each side. We're not going to get
good solutions until Eva finally works through whatever is blocking her.
