That is the problem, the quality standard is way too high for a solo project and the project itself seems massive on scale. There is literally no way a solo dev can finish this before 2030. He needs to hire or share profits with other artists/programmers in order to achieve completion in a reasonable time frame. Otherwise, by the time this game reaches completion, others will be out there, technology will have changed again and the project will be abandoned yet again.
Mechanically he has pretty much everything already built up, only thing that are missing on that aspect are some minor QoL features and a portion of his idea of "multiple operators management", that still need to be implemented.
Assets and animations take time, for that very purpose he invested on a mocap suit to expedite the animations creation (and it shows); he has also contacted an animator to see if he can offload some work, but that's still a trial...
The "issue" is that he's no where near a budget where he can reliably hire or commission help, never was.
And for those that wonder why playable updates are few and far between: the reason is precisely the lack of these assets, a lot of work is being done under the hood, with a lot to discuss regarding feature and mechanics, but little to actually
see. This has changed since he begun working with mocap, one thing a time, we'll get there...