You know I need to respond, not personal, as I have really liked a lot of your post. but we will need to agree to disagree here. on some of it.
I'm incline to disagree. 8 years are a lot of time. But taking into consideration that this games are developed by a skeleton team with limited hardware it can be understandable. About the numbers dropping... well... what did you espect? In such a long time span even the best AAA games drop in number. It's just to be expected.
That's why if a dev wants to really make a living out of this activity they should put it to heart to deliver in 3 - 4 years and move on with a new shiny project with updated technology, more experience and all the good will gained out of a good, delivered, complete project.
Being A DIK, Takes about 1 year to put out an ep. a Movie from Pixar with 800+ people working on a movie takes 3 to five years to complete it. that means for WHI it would require about 100 too 160 people to complete in 3 to five years. they have 3 and some QA and testers not even close to what is needed to produce at a faster pace. but these games are really meant to be released like a comic once a week a little ep but those are too small so monthly would be Ideal. so I hope Cheeky and team look at their next game as a job and release at a better speed.
But i guess for some just dragging it for years works. Curious thing this one is the very first western VN with 3D models i've played. It's also the project that teached me early to not ever support a dev on Patreon
I understand this very much I have Supported many over my years of enjoying this genre and several have become abandoned two I really loved "The Sins of the father" "53x Homecoming" and a few others like C-plan, Midlife Crisis.
Cheeky Gimp took the time when the release would be a while to stop all Support collection for months in a row so I don't think he and his team were milking its followers, just not putting out timely Eps to keep the Followers. but we do love this game. I did drop support of one DEV do to game was not to my taste and he change style too much for me. i hope to be more of a Steam person as they allow more games like this.
Anyway, it would have been all good if after chapter 24 they would have, you know, put out chapter 25 and the ending and THEN started the reworking for steam.
Releasing Chapter one over ep25 was talked a lot about on Patreon and discord and most thought releasing Chapter 1 on steam would be better for the dev and loyal followers will wait for ep 25 and the epilogs to come.
There is only one way to describe rebooting the whole project 1 chapter away from the ending in an attempt (i really hope mostly failed) to keep the hype up: A DICK MOVE.
I'm not so sure here if your wrong or right as this is your thoughts and you should speak how you feel about it will help dev in future to improve. but a Dick move i disagree as it was discussed with his supporters before he stopped working ep25 to complete the first part of the steam build. and we know it takes money to build these games and if followers are stagnate or dropping to prevent abandonment he built a steam release I am for it I want a finished product.
There are some other project in which the dev, at a certain point, was like "ok, this project wasn't so great so far, i'm going to remake it". But at last in general they wrapped a quick ending and then they started the better bigger remake.
you are so right here, there are too many that have stopped the game and started a reboot of their games. I find this has two main reasons. One the DEV ability has grown and old work sucked compared to current work output. The second is the software has gone through an upgrade and requiring a mis match to current products and old released product. Lots of games have sub come to this and just dropped out of development