Could you please elaborate on what you said here? Are you saying that developers cannot mention using Honey Select to make the games while simultaneously posting tons of screenshots that were clearly made by using Honey Select? If yes, that still didn't excuse not disclosing that he's using pre-made assets. He could simply say "I'm using pre-made assets that someone else made for free" without mentioning Honey Select at all.
Also, the point is that not having to create his own asset should pretty significantly reduce his workload, but the delay between updates continue to grow instead. Would the patrons be as understanding with the growing delay if they knew that he didn't even have to make (some) of the asset? That's the issue I have with the lack of transparency.
I'm not super familiar with how much is original asset made by him (if any) and how much is pre-made by someone else. But one really good example was posted here
https://f95zone.to/threads/waifu-academy-v0-9-4a-irphaeus.9414/post-7233398 where it showed how the blackmail material doesn't make sense because Helen is the one who has to lose.
Just from memory (sorry, it has been a while since I last played this), a few other examples of what don't quite make sense IMO (note: I don't know whether these are pre-made or original)
1. Isabella's black magic/hypnotism scene. While it is possible that it was planned like that, it really came out of nowhere and didn't seem to fit into the story up to that point.
2. The lack of that volleyball girl (Haruka?) content despite the game has been in development for 4 years. This might be due to lack of pre-made asset that would fit into her story, or the dev is simply unable to come up with any plot for her.
3. Sauna scene with Jira also felt forced IMO because she gained completely nothing for helping MC, as if there's a sauna asset and just inserted into the game.
I will concede that none of the three I mentioned are 100% proven because of the pre-made asset because I simply don't know which one is which, but my point remains that relying on pre-made asset could lead into backwards development. Also note that I mentioned that I wonder whether the dev has an actual plan and whether he can execute such plan. Using the lack of Haruka content as an example, the questions to answer are what the plan is and why it hasn't been done after all this time. If there is no backward development at all, then the answer is because the dev doesn't have any plan for her which is a bad thing. If there is backward development, then the answer is because the dev hasn't found pre-made asset for her that could be worked into the game which is also a bad thing.