Thanks for sharing with us, a little whining is totally justified every now and then with how tough game dev is. This reminded me of this really interesting podcast about keeping scope smaller in games and validating the success of your game before getting too far in. youtu.be/xINHrIvtPrk?...
<3 Yeah, it's good to figure out early if you want to go for it or not, and what the scope should be. And I think I'm managing it well. The biggest timesink is the attention to detail that I want the project to exhibit. It takes time to hand-craft, tune, and polish its many elements.
Absolutely it's really tough putting the amount of love that you want to into the game. Ideally we'd be able to work in small teams to manage that but it's tough to find partners that share your vision, goals, preferred gameplay, etc. that you also trust if you're not paying them upfront.