I was originally editing my previous post but decided to make a dedicated one for that as well - I'm not above fetching some suggestions:
From what I remember, the game was basically only ever inteded with a certain end-budget (what was it, like 20k/month?) in mind and anything above that is pretty much gratitude and similar. Well, I'm just gonna go out on a limb here and assume that if the salary of the team is fixed and the costs are totally covered while also storing some cash for potentially harsh times or extra costs that the team might come across, why not add onto the team with potential funds that can be spared, but only where it actually matters:
For once - get a second coder back onto the team. I can already hear you shout "But Pr0man! Why a second coder and not an artist or animator or similar? That'll barely do anything to speed up the process." - Correct, the speed at which they'd work would only increase by a bit. But that isn't the entire point of doing that in the first place.
What if Dogeek catches a really bad sinus infection or worse things and at the very worst case has to be hospitalized? What if there ever is going to be a horrible event happening that causes him to drop out of the team? Then there'd be no dedicated programmer that would work on the game and someone else has to jump in and fiddle around with potentially unfamiliar code to make do, or the progress in its' entirety is going to come to a screeching halt. If there are two coders working in tandem on a project, they can pitch ideas on how to implement things, get familiar with the code the other person writes and if there ever is a severe case of the sniffles going around there'd at the very least be some small redundancy so someone who is primarely working on Art isn't required to jump in and spaghetti something up.
Not just that, but having such a big project with such a huge follower count rely on a single dedicated coder is asking for trouble later down the line. Anybody ever considered the mental pressure that is generally taken for granted in the development industries? I'm at this point honestly worried about Dogeek's mental well-being, with him being basically the sole coder in a project that has a fanbase that can turn absolutely toxic on a whim - case in point, some of the followers here and even I have been guilty of being extremely salty from time to time.
So, why not also get another animator to go after the same principle? The animators are outsourced and the animations commissioned - from what I could gather reading through the posts, they are commisioning AEHentai to do the animation bits and are also looking to get a second animator going in order to get the heavy workload sorted out. So they are aware that there's a bottleneck and that maybe a commissioned piece is not going to make it in time.
I'm not sure how commissions are handled and if there's a long-running contract for it or what the hoo ha, so I can't really form an opinion on that topic.
And the artists? Oh well - while it's true that people can copy artstyles to a certain degree, there's always gonna be differences that are noticable and have to be corrected, especially when it comes to characters. It would speed up the process in the long run after the initial phases, but then again, which artist would have a career mark as working on a (successful mind you) porn game in their portfolio for when they might wanna move onto a more "mainstream" project? On the other hand, I can _totally_ see a secondary artist drawing background graphics for the game, as the style is destinct enough to warrant a look, but not something that has to be the primary focus of the lead artist.
But hey, those are just my ideas and maybe I'm just talking out of my ass here.
EDIT: fixed some typos, probs not all of them.
EDIT 2: iirc, there were originally 2 coders on the project to begin with, so I fixed some wording to reflect that.
