First, it was personal circumstances.
Then, I failed to package the release properly, so Steam rejected it. It's been ready to go on itch.io for weeks now but Steam's setup is much more difficult with their depots, builds, packaging, etc, scattered among multiple tabs in the settings. Still, my fault there.
Then, it bombed in Steam's testing. Much of which was bizarre and we can't reproduce. Some of it valid such as the hotplugging issue. Some of it just outright frustrating because Steam's Windows environment hurts games with more than 4 gamepads than it helps -- and they still provide no clear resolution for that. See the game's readme for more details.
Anyhow, I reported the hotplugging bug to the package provider, Rewired, (a bug that wasn't in earlier versions of Rewired) and got an update from them. I'll be releasing a demo update for that shortly.
Meanwhile, the wait continues for Steam to slowly test and retest. A good thing, I suppose, but it sure is a black box... and they really need to change the defaults with how they work with gamepads on Windows. The game developer's work for gamepad support should take precidence, and Steam's shims to help or hurt that should be optional. That should be obvious, right?