Also, legally hiring other people when you're not a company is a bureaucratic hell in Spain, where they live. The amount of paperwork they'd have to do is staggering, and would be a huge time drain to set up.
What people should keep in mind, this game is a 'husband&wifey' kinda deal, so ANY hiring of ANY third party, would be NTR!
That was a joke, ofcourse..
I don't know the rules and/or employment laws in Spain, but you don't need to 'employ' a person, to have them work for you..?
So if you wanted someone to mow your lawn, you don't have to 'employ' them, you just find someone and ask 'How much you want for mowing this lawn', or if you wanted some more electric outlets/sockets in a room of your house, you'd just call some electrician and ask him to give an offer for whatever you had in mind.
But to be honest, I don't really mind the long development time on the updates, it's the art that's the bottleneck, and it would annoy me more if the art-style was inconsistent between scenes...
Also, the way I see it, this game is a passion project made by husband and wife, so they should just keep going like this, the game is popular for a reason, no reason to mess that up now.