Some people giving "kudos" to the team or trying to explain "how hard it is to rewrite the codebase" coming off as straight up programming students or people who learned to write Hello world application.
Yes, re-writing code is hard. I do consulting and often my job is to upgrade out of date programs, it is time consuming but even project of this magnitute wouldn't take this long. They also have the benefit of having worked with the original code base and knowing the structure of the game.If you excusing this kind of slow development then it speaks plenty of the kind of "programmer" you are.
Also if it's that so time consuming then they could've easily split the game into a new part, Summertime Saga 1.5, where they make everything what htey want and continue on the story. To decide to rewrite the game when they are so close to ending it is so wild to me and then to drag it out the way they do...miss me with this shit...
Anyway, enough bitching. Thankfully I'm not paying for this -- and people excusing this kind of behavior are absolute tools.