At 25k words this is actually beefier than our usual updates, but because there are so many branches maybe it feels shorter playing than it felt for me writing it.
This is a common problem for games with lots of choices, where the player actually has agency (as opposed to the illusion of it).
The dev is always going to be looking at every update in terms of total work done/resources used. But a player who is making choices that lock them out of content won't necessarily see it, and won't realize how much work was actually done.
Just as an easy example, someone playing Catherine as a pure lesbian is automatically cutting themselves out of all of the straight content with men. Someone playing Catherine on, say, the love path with Eleanor is going to miss any content made for the slave path, along with potential scenes with other possible love interests.
You can wind up with a scenario where there are like a dozen new romance scenes in an update, but some players will literally only get to see one of them. From their perspective, the update is tiny, and they're going to feel cheated if they waited for months just to get one new scene. But in reality, a ton of work went into it.
The problem is, that's on them. They've chosen to play that way rather than to be open to all possible options (or having multiple save files for multiple runs where they're playing differently and seeing different scenes). It's not really the dev's fault.
I know I've probably missed like 70% of the romance content in the game because I'm playing pure dick-dodger (even Sigrid), and I committed to Eleanor-as-girlfriend. I've also turned down dommy vampires and squid ladies, because my Cat doesn't like giving up control. But I made that choice knowing full well it would be the case.
