Pretending a problem doesn't exist only makes things worse, ...
This isn't about a leaking gas pipe or your erectile dysfunction. (just joking, luv. I'd suck it if I was 10 years younger)
This is about a dev depending on continuous monthly revenue stream from people who paid attention to his work. This is attention-based economy; people have different morals about what the dev does, some may like him, others may hate him, but he will keep getting people paying him for as long as attention to his project keeps being generated.
I watched a LOT of Patreon/Kickstarter projects in the last decade, & it's always the same story; devs like Star Citizen's, drag out a project to go much longer than necessary, even with the limited manpower considered. How they kept getting suckers? Simple: Generate attention. For as long as there is something grabbing public attention, there will always be suckers, because there will always be a few people with some extra bucks, who
1. look at the current state of the project & liked what they saw because they literally received content in a single day, that the rest of the community has been slowly dripfed over 36 months
2. look at "haters" in bad light by default either out of genuine good nature or just narcissism
If just 80% of the current community can agree to drop out of this project completely & leave(thus "pretending it doesnt exist"), hardly anyone else gonna realize the game exists.
Even for this thread, if someone can bribe the mod to make this thread not get back up to front page everytime someone posts, lurkers will have to try REAL HARD to find out about this game, & as a lurker myself, I can tell ya I wouldnt have either.
That's why, attention matters for projects of this nature. You wanna force the dev to reconsider, you ignore them.