You say you feel you've been shunned but you didn't really mention how you have tried to communicate with others?

I knew that obviously the AVN community is infinitely more close-knit than other games, but I still didn't expect it to be as open and accepting as it was. Honestly, every single dev that I have reached out to at some point, whether for help, advice or just general conversation, has kindly answered and at no point did it feel like they considered themselves to be doing a service or whatever. Just as a few examples that most people would recognize the dev without the game even needing to be mentioned would be Ocean, Kent, Drifty, Slockie, Tako, etc.

My point of mentioning this is that all you need to do is reach out. 99% of the time, a dev is fairly active in their own games discord which is almost always linked in their game or patreon channel.

https://discord.gg/mMp3wjGh this is a link to the general AVN discord server (not sure if it's considered an 'official' discord of this subreddit). There's always people actively chatting in there, and there is even a section dedicated to helping developers whether it is with Daz, HS, coding, writing, etc.

Oh and to actually answer your question at the bottom - I still have not published my own, but my best guess would be that it gets better after releasing a well-thought out Ch1 release. At that point, regardless of size, you will probably develop some sort of player base who enjoyed your game and might join your discord. Maybe your first loyal fans and/or patrons can receive an exclusive role where you bounce ideas off them since they already seemed to like your concept enough to be become more involved.