And all this has nothing to do whatsoever with developers (in general, not talking about specific ones) trying to do everything in their power in order to maximize the emotional investment* of early accessers/beta testers, because how else would you lead people to provide thousands of hours of unpaid testing, free PR, free community work, etc. etc. (all things they would else have to do themselves or pay for if outsourced)?
Sorry, that's the other side of the coin, and you cannot have one without the other: you choose to rely on people's emotional investment in order to make them work for you/fork cash before there's even a commercial product, you are bound to have emotional reactions if things turn out disappointing or unexpected for whatever reason.
A much more mature approach by potential customers, and one which would get rid of most of said liquid shit of butthurt, would be: don't spend a dime on kickstarter, don't get involved on Early Access, don't do any beta-testing, don't provide any good publicity without even knowing the final product. Just wait for the final release, then wait some more for a decent amount of patches, read reviews, read opinions, and only then decide whether part from your hard earned cash.
Now, would you wish Overhype that all their potential fans and customers would choose such a much more mature approach to their second game?
*I'm talking about emotional investment in a broad sense: feeling part of a project, contributing to the improvement of something that has potential, etc. etc.
That's an immature, veiled threat to withhold money and support unless they comply with your expectations. Like your 'work' testing during EA entitles you to something. As though without your 15 dollars in alpha their project would have failed. You are doubling-down, listing the reasons why they owe it to you.
Which threat are you talking about? As I said previously, I waited to see if they would include the additional combat environments (since it was a deal-breaker for me), they did not, I did not buy their game, end of the story. Am I obliged to throw money the developers' way before they prove their product deserve it? Are developers entitled to my money and support no matter what? I never get involved in EA, and never have, for the reasons I listed above. That's a pretty insane rant you condensed in only a couple of lines. Yes, I'm afraid I 'withold' money all the time from products that don't comply with my expectations (i.e., I don't buy them): it's called 'market', sorry you find it immature. Do you even read what you write?
The annoying part of all this is that with each and every Early Access, there's people with excessive emotional involvement who either go "this is not what I expected, I'll throw a temper-tantrum and try my hardest to demonize the developers", or they go "the developers are my heroes, I will defend each of their choices no matter how stupid, and in order to do that I will try my hardest to demonize the customers". Both categories are equally pathetic, but what's especially laughable is the fact that those who belong to the second group see themselves as the mature and rationale ones, when they are just the equivalent of the tantrum throwers at the other end of the spectrum.
Luckily most of normal people who get involved in EA tend to go either "I invested a lot of time in this and I am overall satisfied with the final product, but I understand the complaints of some people" or "I invested a lot of time in this and I am overall disappointed, but I understand the developers' difficulties, whatever".
End of the story: if developers want to avoid any emotional backlash, it's quite simple, don't exploit future customers' emotional investment, show up with your finished product and let the market judge it. Like with any other kind of product or service. If you want to exploit the future customers' emotional investment, well, be prepared to take the bad with the good, like with anything else in life.
Or do like Elhoim says, and try within the limits of the possible to cater to your audience. And if your audience turns out to be impossible to please, it means you chose the wrong target/market segments, and once again you only have yourself to blame. Again, like with everything else.