There is a staff of about half a dozen people that DC pays. As for the "less than a year" idea - they hoped the current tech-update would have only taken that long, but the mess of the code from years of piecemealing it together is taking longer to unravel and solidify. There are nearly 20,000 images that the posing team has to repose to the new 16:9 display ratio from the old 4:3 ratio.
The artwork is always under review and revision. The whole tech-update that has been underway for the past year 2+ years is the improvement you are talking about.
No one pays for it. The game is free for download on the developer's website for anyone to play without paying a penny. However, the average Patreon subscriber drops little more than $2 per month - less than the price of a candy bar.
Finally, the past page or so may be off-topic for this thread.
Dozens of people? Wow, they must be the most incompetent team of developers on earth.
If you have to scale images you develop a script that does it automatically. All those problems that you comment to me are something extremely basic and simple to solve for any programmer with a little bit of experience.
Usually a team of 4 developers, in less than a month are forced to publish more advanced, clean, complete and professional code than this thing that is more closer to a power point presentation than a game, it is absurd to think that in 2 years you could not develop something much more advanced, while thousands of indie developers around the world do it every day.