I feel the real dev problems not related to rl stuff (because I do believe the stuff that happened in 2020 and the start of 2021 were legit) was when BD announced he was working on a remake of the first 10 days, which I had been voicing my concerns early on. I feel that that alone started to take away a lot of his mojo where because he was splitting his time between the remake and new updates, he started to fall behind and freak out. This is when he most likely started making the posts where he started making excuses to try and make it seem like bad things kept happening, which did get a lot of people's sympathy until he released DITLO instead of the mega updated he'd promised a good 6 months prior.
As someone around from the beginning I would say that the first sign of issues began when people started to comment on the cis-Shauna backstory being weak in comparison to the trans one. In
my mind this wasn't an issue as I assumed the trans story was the canon path in BD's head and the cis story was a concession and so
I would said exactly that; cis players get a worse experience but it's either that or delete the game and play something else
There was the fallout from the purge of 2019 when Patreon was forced to get strict on the anti-incest train in order to keep their payment processors, without which they wouldn't be a viable business. No matter what BD claims
now, it is obvious that the original intention was for Azel, Willow and, possibly, Wendy to be lewdable characters before this. The teases still present in the first few days are more than enough evidence of this and still, to this day, cause new players to ask when Azel will be lewdable, requiring a repost of the Azel loop meme
The big issue was the introduction of Talismah as the third client. The initial presentation by Rachel gave the impression that the clients would only appear in the game for as long as they needed to in order to get pregnant then disappear once they were (which is a clever way to add sex scenes early on before MC's fellow students would be ready to join his harem). Tali's introduction broke that entirely, she's Rachel's pseudo daughter who her 'mum' is pimping out to a virtual stranger in order to get her knocked up when she's barely been outside in a decade or more
BD had the good sense to re-write her introduction but that also meant fucking over the patrons who'd voted for her to be a client with immediate lewd scenes
To me, the announcement of a complete replacement of the first 10 days was just another problem
