All jokes aside…
Everything is just speculation until the game comes out and it’s either worth the wait, or it’s not worth the wait.
It’s a developer's choice if they want to hold off a release until they think they have something worthy of release, however it’s a gamble on their behalf, release something too soon and people will say it’s shit, release something too slowly and people will get tired of waiting and start calling the developer a lazy milker motherfucker!
We see it all the time with AAA games. They have a deadline and when they release before it’s ready, people condemn them for releasing an unfinished product. When they delay the release, people go apeshit.
Of course the Patreon model adds another layer of suspicion due to the money the developer is taking in regardless of output. Considering how much money some developers are making, their reports should be a lot more detailed than a bunch of bars in a chart. But if people want to pay, it’s their money.
Now I haven’t followed this development cycle from the beginning for this game, so I don’t know if there were any legitimate interruptions to this release, but the trend across this whole site is that a lot of the better games are progressively taking longer and longer between updates.
People are gonna complain when a game takes longer than usual to receive an update; that's fair enough. What I personally don't like is when people start rating a good game very poorly because hasn't received an update in a while. Something like
Waifu Academy is getting very sparse updates, so people are getting angry and rating it 1 star, which is BS because the game currently has over 20 hours of reading, it's extremely well done, making it longer and more entertaining than some lauded games on Steam (I'm looking at you, Mafia: Definitive Edition).
On the subject of the Orc release, I wasn't particularly thrilled when I discovered the previous update was all very much Rose-centric, but by the end of the episode I really enjoyed it. So I imagine the Orc episode will be similarly entertaining, if I'm not dead from old age by the time it comes out...