First of all is you have a tiny bit of knowledge about coding you probably should know that sometimes fixing a bug creates a few more, you need to be careful with this kind of thing. Second by your 40 min assumption of gameplay you are basically telling me that you most likely skip the dialogs and go straight to the sexy content. Last update with only a short break for dinner I spend close to 4 hours just enjoying the story. The only thing I will agree with you is that this update has taken to long to arrive at this pace we will have a finished product in 2 decades. At the end if this update gives me at least 3 hours of entertainment it will be worth the wait, if it doesn't well probably drop the project and move on.
The "fixing a bug to create ten more" isnt a reoccurring issue with renpy, it just means you suck at designing and planning the game and this game isnt anything special in its architecture, you have a lot more "dynamic" renpy games in here, and again we are here assuming that they take a whole day just to fix 10 (huge, time consuming) bugs in a renpy game. In my view this means that they either dont put more than half an hour of work per day into the project or they have the absolute worst implementation and lie about the current state of the game.
Im just surprised at the amount of people who defend this most anti-consumer philosophy of game development that encourages and rewards devs to be lazy and make excuses to take development as slow as possible, while getting paid monthly by a cult of people who will defend it from any criticism and got no idea how much unproductive work they are paying for.
Im not here to complain about the development time of a project i dont pay for, just agreeing with someone who is rightfully pointing that what the devs pretend to be doing is a lie.