For all I know, the state of the game programming was a complete spaghetti mess and adding anything would be a journey to redo the game over again
if only this were the first time they've 'fixed' it, but they've done it countless of times before and every time the claim was that "after we get this tech update done, it'll be much faster and easier to add new content". but that never happened, none of the up to 2 years long tech updates made ANY difference, and none of the several remaking of art changed the art in a significant way. it's simply been at least 6 years of busy work with nothing to show for it.
nothing explains the lack of progress except that they have NOT been working for most of the time over last 6 years. and with 70k donations per month that gets people more than a little bit frustrated.
one more thing about the quality of code some people here obsess about: IT DOESN'T MATTER, it's a god damn renpy game! if you can click yourself to a different location and the characters show on top, YOU'RE DONE! doesn't matter how bad your code is, if you can operate a handful of readymade renpy functionalities there's no reason to overcomplicate it. it's not banking software, it's not a massively parallel server software nor an operating system. it's god damn renpy.