In case of SS the whole development cycle is somewhat different anyway, because ultimately everything is limited by DC's ability to draw and the amounts of art he manages to produce. In the end that's what everything is scaled up to. Since he basically doesn't do anything else but drawing, the amount of art he creates per year (or per what ever time frame one likes) will decide the amount of content we get. Sure, coding, posing, bug fixing, etc. may delay single updates for a few weeks, but in the time his team is fixing stuff, he's already working on the next update, so effectively there's no time lost on that broader scale. If, for example, DC needs another 3 years to draw the art to "finish" the game, the game will be done in 3 years (+ 2/3/4 weeks to wrap up that last update), no matter what the coders, etc. do in the meantime. So it doesn't really matter what happens as long as DC is actually drawing.