I'm not sure how he is on Patreon, but it's one of the games I'm happy to subscribe to. He is very consistent with updates, and the art and animation have greatly improved. The sandbox and day mechanics are still kinda buggy, as is trying to figure out how to trigger events. But overall its a fun game.
I'm happy that you're content with what the dev provides, but I have to correct one thing for sure. He is NOT consistent with upgrades. For a good while now there have been absolutely nothingburger updates especially among the 9.x ones. Not to mention that even compared to the 2-week update schedule that the dev himself set, the updates very often run late without any communication about the delay, and fans end up waiting even a month just to get a single update that has ~20 mins of content (without a hint of spice in it, mind you).
The H-scenes are typically nice, but even those are basically just stock Koikatsu actions with some camerawork. The story and worldbuilding is far from being so good that is would excuse the lack of H-scenes in some parts of the game. The models are nice with a good variety but you don't get to enjoy it much because we get events with a new character once in a blue moon. The whole festival arc was way too ambitious for its own good yet barely anything came out of it. We got introduced to like a dozen new characters and barely 5 of them had any meaningful progression, not to mention older characters also barely got any new events. Might I mention that this whole festival thing has been going on for almost 1,5 years if we include the preparation events?
Then there's the issue of the dev's very broad interpretation of what an "event" is, becuase for the past half year we have been sometimes getting 3-5 events per update, but those events
together are about as long as 1-2 events previously. I'm talking about things like following a character going around the school, but every place she goes is considered a separate event and you have to go there using the sandbox mechanism, only to get a few lines.
And as you mentioned, there's the issue of figuring out how to trigger events. Main story events are somewhat straightforward if you can figure out what the engrish phrases mean, not that we get any of those recently... Then there are the character events, which you do get hints for that are usually helpful but sometimes not at all, sometimes you just don't get a hint even though that given character still has events you haven't seen and there's also the issue of the per-character event replay, which does a very poor job of letting you reexperience all the events that the given heroine plays a major role in. And iirc there's not even a main/general story even replay section. And the worst part of it all, the "easter egg" events, these are just scattered all over the place but you get zero hints about how to trigger them even though some of them need very specific conditions. Last time I played the game there was still at least 2 events that were in the game to the best of my knowledge but I couldn't trigger them. I say to the best of my knowledge, because the dev also does a terrible job of listing out all of the events that get added or are already in the game, both inside and outside the game itself. Like you just have no idea if there are still events you haven't seen, and if so then how many and how to get them. No walkthrough or complete gallery that can be unlocked with a code either. It is simply the worst game in this regard among its peers.
On the topic of codes, the cheat code also barely does anything. You get access to an "add money" cheat, some custom outfits for the heroines and that's about it.
I also tried asking about the list of hidden events, how to unlock them, etc. on the discord server but that server is a bad joke. Full of spam, shitposting, random chinese discourse and barely any activity from the dev.
The dev also tried to involve the community in deciding things such as which heroines to focus on next or what kinda events to add, but even in these cases the end result is still lackluster.
And to circle back, the dev sometimes takes long with the update because of totally useless side quests, the most atrocious example of it being learning blender to make 3D models of chibi plushies of characters you can win in a terrible RNG-based minigame in a meaningless event, and successfully collecting them all gives you
absolutely nothing (at least it didn't when the event was introduced, maybe there was some extra benefit added later on?).
Yes, the game is available for free (though generally 2 weeks after the supporter release if the dev doesn't forget to post a public build update...), but I was a tier 3 supporter for a while and that still isn't a lot of money, but I would expect more than what I have described above. I was even considering helping with the english proofreading for a while to make the game more palatable. But by the time the 10.x updates came around I got so fed up with the 0 progression updates taking a month that I eventually stopped supporting altogether and haven't even played the game since then. To be clear, I do want to play the game, but only when there's a significant amount of new content and I wouldn't pay a penny anymore while just waiting for it to happen.
Btw, 10.9 has become free about a week ago and finally we got some scenes that we should've gotten half a year ago, but I'm still not convinced to redownload the game.