I want to thank you for taking the time to write this up (I read it twice). Now I want to reiterate a big thing that is being missed by a lot of people. BoB2 did not take away from any SU releases. In fact SR7 did a stupid amount of hours in Oct to free up time to do BoB2 for Dec. Let me just put it in perspective below.
If we followed our precedent the releases would have looked like this:
Sept: SU update
Nov: SU update
Dec: nothing (we break for holidays 2-3 weeks)
Feb: SU update
But instead we did this
Sept: SU update
Oct: SU update
Dec: BoB2
Feb: will be SU
So really where did you lose an SU update here? We over delivered, you got the 2 SU updates we promised and a fun small game.
There is no back and forth, the next update to BoB2 will be it's completion. I understand that it's somewhat confusing , time has to go somewhere. But BoB2 is a very small game, designed completely for Newgrounds.
Hey. Big fan of a decade (I think, how old is your first Avatar work?) Just leaving my two bits. Your issue here seems to be communication. Not content delivery. People complain about content because they don't understand (and a lot don't want to take the time) what your priorities and focus is.
Surprises are nice, but they also risk backlash so I'd wage more carefully when doing them
My Advice is try to figure out a better way to communicate than you're currently doing but that still fits the way you communicate and can be yourself. Patreon posts open to everybody with more details are also a good way for people to shut down critics or whiners that didn't read or didn't care to read about explanations.
I really like your stuff in general, on the writing part you nail down Lex and JL characters incredibly well, and you have a great sense of humor imo. The gameplay part? Eh. Not my thing. I'd always thought people would be better off just doing it like a VN instead of modeling on those old flash dating Sim but that's me being wrong. Art is ofc the reason we're all here and I love it. I love you do different body types. I specially love you do more Amazonian body types like Superwoman and Wonder Woman. My advice moving forward is to keep doing everything you're doing with writing and art, maybe do more writing as I think you can do deeper and more complex stuff that keep people more invested, but seriously consider either dropping the gameplay or making the grinding part into a mini-game that's fun in some way.
