Honestly, I think the transparency of the software development process has led to a lot of people just flat out getting spoiled.
Showing my age a little bit here, but there was a time, many, many moons ago, when life before a game release went something like
1. Hear about a game you were interested in through word of mouth, or an article written somewhere.
2. Get excited for it.
3. Hear nothing about the development process of said game, only that it was being worked on, until the publisher/developer decided to announce a release date.
4. Wait.
5. On release day, buy the silly thing.
Now it's just a damn cavalcade of "Why isn't it out yet?"
It's like being stuck in the backseat of a car on a road trip through desolate Siberia or something, with people constantly screaming in your ear "Are we there yet?! How about now?! How about now?!"
And I sort of get it, I mean, the difference between now and then is that with systems like Patreon or Kickstarter or whatever, people are actually funding development of these projects. It's not like you have to wait until the finished product is released (and thus are beholden to whenever the developer chooses to release it) to give people your money. No, you're giving them your money all throughout, and yes, I'll agree that that entitles backers/supporters/whatever to some kind of tangible proof that progress is being made. But well, there's always the Caveat Emptor principle: if you don't like how someone's spending your money, stop giving it to them. Withdraw your support. And if you're not paying them to begin with, well... right...
Careful, a subjective opinion ahead and therefore to be taken with a grain/heap/truckload of salt.
In my opinion, therein lies the entire problem. When you are doing something (like software development) with a more or less public community that has easy means of reaching you, then you are inclined to hear the voices crop up. (regardless of what voices that may be)
You can't have just both, a transparent development cycle and a nice and unaware audience this way. It just doesn't work, the phrase "having your cake and eat it" comes to mind. Besides, to be fair, that'd be just as disrespectful to your community as the AAA industry has become, that only sees their customers als walking wallets, if you would try to just straight up ignore their questions, requests, or just demand for information whilst also saying you have a transparent development cycle. And with Patreon and other platforms giving people the power to invest into something like that by means of funding development, either because they think it's the next big thing, because they like the devs, or because they want a product that's the tits, it's more or less trying to level the field between dev and their community.
With that in mind, I can easily understand why many, maaaany people are pissed at the fact that DC is always so silent when it either comes to release dates, or information in general. You go to their patreon to check the status, and the first thing to get reminded of, is that they rake in nearly 30 grand a month. Obviously, many people are like "Damn, that's a wad of dosh, why in the name of fuckness is this taking so long?". That'd also include me, though I atleast have patience in that regard. Heck, I could live off of 2k (tax not included/Germany) a month easily without doing any kind of work whatsoever. therefore I'd be able to devote my entire time into whatever I feel like.
I guess times do change, huh? Back then, companies were more than happy to get free beta testers and bugfixers on the way, especially for mmo's, and now people are even willing to drop money for the "privelege" to do just that, give them easy bugtesting.
Something else that I did notice is either funny, or extremely sad:
If you aren't a supporter of the patreon, it's always "You're not a supporter, your opinion doesn't matter."
and if you are a supporter(which I am, yay), they always drop "Well you have no clue on how game development works, your opinion doesn't matter". kind of sad really, now the community that the game has built up is ignoring partly/entirely elements of itself, because I'm pretty damn sure by now many people are frustrated, and even the ones willingly defending the project start to get some niggling doubt, when they have to constantly silence any opposing opinion/argument, though on that matter, why even silence opinions? they're just that, opinions, something subjective. If they were objective, they'd be facts or arguments, which would react to objective treatment and therefore resolve themselves. It's really just energy blown into the wind..