Your opinion is not based on fact but on trust in someone who has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that he deserves no trust. Beware of soiling yourself when you repeat the words of someone like that.
You don't know for certain that art for the Tech Update was EVER anywhere close to what DC claimed. Art was always 100% in DC's hands. It was a % written in a status progress/report image and nothing more and you choose to base your "never" and "ever" on a status report that was proved to be spectacularly meaningless about a million times over the past 3 years. It goes up and down arbitrarily with no clue on how it really relates to a true 100%.
Just the following should be enough for anyone to NEVER EVER trust DC again:
How can you possibly still trust someone who turns "3 to 4 months" into 34 months with no end in sight? I honestly don't even know which is more grotesque: Going 10 times over a deadline you yourself have set or doing that AND not even having a deadline after?
Now, if you try to argument BUT I KNOW then I wrote this for nothing because no, you absolutely don't.
I will say DC fooled a lot of people with this project, including me for a good while. The one thing I failed to see until years later is how this project's sole fundamental feature is it has no realistic ending. At first it wasn't readily apparent. The release schedule was somewhat reasonable (even though it faltered after 2018) and it just felt like maybe it will take a few years but the game definitely goes somewhere.
It was only around 2020 I realized that DC will work on this project for however long the cash keeps coming in (but I couldn't foresee the Tech Update megascam). The thing that triggered my awakening was how DC handled resume-playback-in-new-version-from-previous-version-saves. As people might remember, unlike 99 out of 100 most famous Ren'Py games, Summertime Saga kept failing at handling past saves even after they said they fixed it several times (old saves basically only worked when used between bugfix releases like 0.18.0 > 0.18.1 > 0.18.2 and even then it was sketchy).
The reason is simple. SS goes head on against how Ren'Py is designed due to a managerial decision from DC who said he wants to keep coming back to content that was already delivered and adjust it as new stories are added. Remember that? It was a massive wake up call. In normal software development this kind of move is suicidal because it's not economically feasible. Customers don't want to pay for slightly altered things they already received no matter how much better you think you've rererererereremade them. But DC can use this rereredoing pattern to prolongue SS for as many years as it's profitable to do so. What is the Tech Update? A megarerereredoing of what was already delivered. It wasn't supposed to contain any new major story.
So beware who you're placing your trust in. DC is a megascammer. He asked approval from his paying patreons for something that was supposed to take 10 times less than it already took and at no time when he kept going over the deadline did he showed any good faith interest to realign with expectations and his own promises. All his moves are focused on deception and dancing around the core of the problem (Hey how about these sidereleases nobody asked for? Hey how about these
We don't know what comes at the end as it depends on his private life. He already got $3-4 million and he stands to make at least one more million as long as he changes nothing in his m.o. Maybe that's enough for him to literally one day disappear and that's that. Maybe not, so then he'll have to resurrect SS and deliver the TU + something more. This doesn't change what he is and what he's done and it certainly doesn't change the end of the Summertime Saga project which will most certainly not be [COMPLETED].
