I think there's clearly a ton of quality work going into this game. It has the largest world of any game like this. It has more characters and more dialogue than any I've played. It has repeatable events that don't necessarily just feel like opening a menu. It's so ridiculously intuitive and enjoyable to play. The art is fantastic. There are so few games that achieve any single one of these things, but Saga has it all. Yet people still grouse about it.
Of course, this phenomena is not new. Alexis De Tocqueville observed in his "The Old Regime and the Revolution" that as France's early democracy began to take shape and as the people's quality of life steadily improved, smaller concerns began to fill a larger space in the national consciousness. In other words, as major problems dissolved, petty problems became the new major problems. Like a gas, problems will always fill the whole volume of the space they occupy. We can see this happening here, I think. Summertime Saga is a game with virtually no substantial problems to it. The only remaining problem with it is that it doesn't come out fast enough. And since this is the only problem, it is the largest problem imaginable to those who will complain.
In short, I have only this to say to people with their supposed hot takes about milking:
Ya basic. And ya boring. And history knows you're wrong to complain.