True, however what then tends to happen is the following. The initial release gets leaked complete with one or two bugs that hadn't been spotted earlier. Possibly even a save-breaking one. Then a very vocal group complains about the release being broken, often times with a distressing amount of vitriol, whilst the public release a month later is usually a bit more polished with those bugs fixed and, very occasionally, a few extra scenes from one of the side categories like the cafeteria scenes or locker room scenes or the like. But still people forget whats happened before and can't display a little patience to wait for a fully ready release.
So pretty much like any indie game pre-release, be it paid or not. I once got a pre-release of a $25 indie game only to instantly discover a game breaking bug since last version. Better yet the developers couldn't reproduce it, so I probably spent like 5 hours in total testing various stuff until I tracked it down specific enough for them to know enough to fix it. To be fair to the developers, the bug was partially triggered by driver/windows settings meaning another person with precisely the same game settings might not encounter it. In fact it seems triggered by my certainly not default settings.
There is also the story of a Japanese visual novel, which got delayed for a month like 2 days before release. The reason being they found a bug, which could corrupt savegames, so they had to come up with a patch for it before anybody started making savegames. Poor guy, who had to open all the boxes and add a note to download the newest patch before starting.
Issues happen, particularly in early releases. If people gets upset about that, then they don't get what early release is.
Well, I've got numerous posts in this thread espousing it's virtues and proudly rocked a signature for over 2 years, but I also feel like it's gone off the rails ever since the whole Mycock Manor filler BS. Aside from that, I've replayed so many times that I'm just kind of over it as the story is memorized and I'm still waiting to actually get with Lucy. I don't think the devs are milking fans but it does seem to be getting overly drawn out at this stage.
I agree, but I will also point out that Mycock Manor is a test ground for new clothing and similar. It's for patreons in order to give them something to vote on and then later it has been released for everybody because... why not? It exist, so it's practically no extra work. Not sure if that is the right approach, but I do get that the patreons have to get the candidates presented somehow.
I do agree that there are plenty of "will be continued in a future update", which feels stalled. Lucy does at least gain something once in a while, through we can agree not enough. The clothing optional beach has stalled seemingly for years like it has been completely forgotten. The main issue I have with this is that we are getting multiple completely new sub-stories while leaving half finished ones behind for ages. Lucy getting a bit more of her story for each update could work, but the completely stalled ones sends a poor signal. I get that it's a passion project and forcing yourself to work on one sub-story when you prefer to work on another is an issue regarding burnout, so it really is a balance. I don't think there is a clear right answer to this question.