From the time you begin prototyping, to your finished product, most of us will have to rewrite either the entire game or significant parts of it. Especially if you're diving into some new technology, the techniques you learn along the way can make your early work pretty miserable, and, worst case scenario, cause some problems with the game itself.
What a great description of the challenge!
For every bit you ask of your community, you’ve got to give them a reason for it.
This is pretty important, and something that I myself unfortunately tend to overlook. Sometimes it’s easy to get overly-focused on the end goal, which leaves the players hanging.
I try to release small changes/additions here and there, but I constantly feel wary of investing into a deprecated system while a rewrite is underway. I need to train myself a bit out of this mindset and let my marketing/community hat win over my engineering hat a bit more.
It sounds like you’ve done a great job balancing your players’ needs against keeping an efficient development plan.
Great post, thanks for the insight!