You Know? For every long paragraph you make, you are right. The success of the game doesn't always come from investing a lot in marketing or its quality, but in an unpredictable way and it is the consumer who decides to buy or not, among other factors.
Many so-called marketing experts or even the developers themselves have the mistaken idea that to be successful, you have to superficially follow trends without understanding them.
Before moving it to Early Access, it was only the alpha and beta demos with free donations, but I realize that even with that model it didn't work much. All this boils down to is that it's not the kind of game that people want?