An update on this, from the dev account rather than my main one. Same person: I build Bitiverse on my own.
Since I asked, the answer to "where does it lose people" turned out to be mostly the first ten minutes and the shop screens, and a lot of that came from one player who sent me fifteen bug reports in a week. All fifteen are fixed. Shop racks now group by what a thing is rather than where it landed, a shop counts its things instead of its shelves, and the row that refuses to open a homestead shop finally says why.
Guilds also grew a council: any member can call a vote, quorum counts people seen in the last fortnight rather than everyone who ever joined, and a passed vote lapses if the leader sits on it for a week.
The ask has not changed, and I am still short of testers. If you have ten minutes, walk in as a guest, come and break something, and tell me where you got stuck or what read wrong. That is the part I cannot see from the inside.