Congratulations, you've described every single developer ever.
Literally nobody asked or paid for and patreon page still says this is an rpg.
Nobody told them to "rework" the world and non-existent story for the millionth time. Seems to me it was all intentional just to milk more patreon cows.
Monthly report: We made it possible to play pong in our sandbox mode!
Yeah, it has been slowly being worked on for years. "Slowly" is an understatement by the way.
I am so happy this is yet another patreon cash grab that is intentionally stuck in a development hell just to milk horny people. I am especially happy with knowing that there are people who actually shamelessly defend this.
About Sandbox, I don't know if you were in the old Wild Life Discord server, but there were a bunch of people happy with focus on Sandbox and there were many people frequently asking for new features to be included. I don't know if you're referring to the Patreon comment section when you say, "Literally nobody asked or paid for-" in reply to the other person mentioning sandbox, but if you were active in the Discord you would have seen the opposite of what you're saying, and as a matter of fact, there are still many people giving feedback and suggesting features for Sandbox in the new Discord server aswell. I can understand wanting the game to speed up with development, I myself was hoping for release this year but that seems unlikely, but you're wrong in saying there wasn't any demand for the sandbox features. There were and still are plenty of people actively engaging and requesting stuff for it, and if I'm being completely honest, I myself just want the campaign stuff to be done so all the assets are updated and all the lower quality model stuff is swapped out. For me, I'm more interested in seeing what people do with Sandbox once the game is complete and hopefully mod tools/mod support is implemented(if that's still being considered). I know there are people interested in the campaign, but in my time spent in the Wild Life Discord servers, a good amount of the active people there were engaged in the sandbox channels.
If not by the end of this year, I do hope the WL devs manage to wrap things up in 2025 at the latest though. After 2025 I don't think we'll be too far off from Elder Scrolls 6, and at that point the horny modders in Bethesda community will have made their own porn game in ES6 like they have in Skyrim, and Skyrim is already unironically one of the best games with porn content available and good visuals + a shit ton of other non pornographic content. I genuinely don't think most porn devs can compete with a Bethesda game modded into a porn game, especially considering by now after so many years modding, most of the horny modders are seasoned in modeling/rigging/animating so they're damn near on a professional level if they aren't already.
Kinda went on a tangent there, but yeah, sandbox did/does have demand and hopefully this game will be complete within these next couple of years.