I was reading somewhere that there were complaints about lost supporters, but maybe if the update(s) didn't take so long to come out, they wouldn't have the issue of supporters leaving and have any reason to complain about it.
You can't expect to take several months to over a year to release an update, and expect everyone to stick around, especially with the number of developers stalling with excuses after excuses these days, or games being abandoned.
I know this site is a bit of a rumor mill, so I don't fault you for misinterpreting all the "he said she said," but figured I'd quickly point out that I've never complained about losing patrons in between updates. It's the opposite: I regularly encourage people to drop their support in between them, then simply pledge again when a new chapter is ready -- explaining that in doing so, they'll be spending no more than $5 per chapter of the game and have access to everything we've ever posted to Patreon for a month.
As explained... one of the good things about Patreon is you don't have to be actively subscribed when content is posted to see said content. The moment your subscription becomes active-- you can see everything.
I also brought this up to highlight a point; a very common contradiction parroted here:
"Updates take a long time because milking." <-> "The dev is losing money & supporters because he's taking a long time."
Make no mistake, if I wanted to milk the people on this website, I'd stop putting so much emphasis into the finer details of VN development and literally churn updates out. Said updates would likely earn me a far greater income and reputation while being half as good and requiring less than half of the effort.
How do I know this would work? Because I've seen it done dozens of times. A simple example formula to highlight what this would look like: quickly churn out a 40 minute discussion between each triplet and follow it up by one or two brief scenes, usually the lewd variety. This would require maybe 100 renders, 1-2 animations, a week or two of rushed dialogue, and about a week of coding. The end result would be about 2-3 hours of content and F95Zone pirates unanimously praising me like I'm the best thing since sliced bread. It's almost laughable how easy it would be.
I won't do this
because I don't have any desire to milk you guys. I am passionate about this project and love creating it... so I'll keep putting my effort and focus into doing the best I can with every single chapter and update, with as little regard for appeasing the angry people in these comments as possible. ← If you take issue with that I encourage you not to support me, to keep getting the game for free if you desire, and to hopefully have fun playing it/enjoy yourselves. What I am saying here is not a declaration of ill-will, and I have nothing against anyone here. Many of the complaints, or at least some of them... were very valid.
On another note, and setting all of the above aside... I do agree and have admitted numerous times that Chapter 4's extra-extra-long development time was our fault, and not something we're proud of. These things do happen. As players have been notified, I've spent a couple of months working towards finding more of a middle-ground between "speed" and "quality" for Chapter 5 onward... and will continue working towards this/trying to shorten dev time for every single update.
P.S. I hope this self-admitted shame of mine brings many people here some great masturbatory material -- you know who you are, and we see the glee you experience at the shortcomings of others! 
/j
Anyway, I hope you and others had fun with the chapter!
