Appreciate the comment and criticism, you're right, the whitepaper does need another update (we already updated it once before this "break" we (primarily I myself) had as things seemed to take longer than you initially plan, markets not helping. It is one thing I will need to update once again now that I'm back.
With regards to the gun, it wasn't important to me to know where the artist was getting inspiration from when generating the concept of it, the important thing to me was the way it is used which makes it unique to other guns, the placeholder for cards on top of it and that it shoots a laser beam. Another thing that's important to note here with our game is that the handgun itself is just one of the first iterations of a capturing device we can have and the design will be limited to the alpha version. There may for instance be other handguns looking differently that players will be able to craft or obtain in the game and even something completely different from a handgun in the future.
We're not in the process right now of building up hype or looking to seek people's "trust" as you mention, they can choose what they want to do by themselves as it wouldn't change many things from our side. We do have a working game and we have leaked a few sneak peeks here and there to people close with the project but without everything being 3D ready we feel it may be too early to show sneakpeeks of it publically as it may weaken the effect of the quality we want the project to have. However as I mentioned in another post, if markets don't go our way, starter sale doesn't do too well, or we just aren't able to find other 3D artists of the same quality to help speed things along we may be forced to launch the game with placeholder 3D assets which we'll just implement whenever they're ready in the case of the game working perfectly well and being ready to be launched in terms of playability.
As for the fanart, we think it's a great strength of the ecosystem that we can reward and appreciate people interested in the project in different ways with rewards, it's something other gaming projects on Hive do as well but it's not something we are attempting to use as a way to hide something or fake hype where we'd attempt to lure them in with rewards. We often spend a lot of our daily voting power on projects like the @hbd.funder if there isn't enough content instead of overrewarding existing content that we feel may not be worthy a full upvote, for example.
Anyway, appreciate the comment.