i don't know, it's not me who makes 60k a month and is given 2 years to find a solution. first thing i'd do is probably get the whole team together and make a real calculation (based on math, not whatever he used to come up with the old estimation of 3 months) of how long the tech update with the current speed of things is going to take and if it turns out that it will probably take a couple more years i'd be honest with my patreons and tell them that. there must be a way to do a rough estimation on how much longer it will take. i would also do anything that i could to find better/more coders, sure at the beginning it might slow things down if you got 2-3 coders working at the same time because the lead coder has to explain to the other ones what they have to do. that's the thing though he had 2 years until now to train some new coders and to do all of that and wasn't his sole coder only employed part time until very recently?
Estimation:
He never made an estimation of 3 months, i think the lowest was like 9, which, still, is a lot less. This is, for me, the biggest mistake he made i think the estimation was rushed and he did not think true when presenting it to the patrons, and that is failing in communication.
Having said that, estimations are tricky, for not saying imposible for this kind of tasks. So I think there are two options: try to do even more planning and distract the team (delaying even more the update) to do a new estimation that probably, almost defenetly, will be false, OR try to communicate the velocity of the projects and what tasks are being done so you can be transparent with the people who pays.
Now, if next year with a functioning base system, adapted to new techonologies and a solid team , they say that the Rhonda update will be 5 months and it ends up taking 10, well , they really suck at this.
Coders:
You can not have what you want with 60k. Actually He has at least 7 people on the team and i have no idea how he could manage that if some of them were not part-timers. Also taxes, patron share, and expenses.
2-3 senior programers who are willing to participate in a porn game are hard to find and REALLY EXPENSIVE. 2-3 juniors dont take desiciones , so now he needs someone to formulate and explain tasks, also expensive. This at the start would be a suicide specially because, as i said , the scope was bad and i dont think they knew what they really want, And now, as you said , would slow down the progress, which has been steady for some months, so it would be a high risk.
lastly i would stop wasting my time drawing more school desks or other shit nobody cares about and work on lots more h-scenes so i can inlude them with the tech update so that the fans don't have to be satisfied with 16:9 resolution, some new empty locations and nothing else after years of waiting.
seriously i was looking at his latest picarto stream checking if it really was true that he was drawing more bullshit and it's true. he's obviously struggling to find stuff to draw so that must mean he has already finished converting all the backgrounds to the new resolution and finished drawing all the ronda, annie and judith art assets right? (lol)
Only work on more scenes for the tech update:
I mean... do you want them to take longer or... ?
Priorities:
Again ...I mean... I do want him to draw school desk and other shit? Part of the quality of this game is how detailed it is. I like to enter to eve apartment and find lot of details, you might want another game but i dont think patrons want that.
Now , this is the thing for me that is really hard to understand: The bottleneck is the code, so why are people so fixated that DC changes what is he doing to speed up the development.
