Yes, it is slightly, but it's the only gameplay benefit that will be given to supporters. More Patreon features will probably be added but they will not give ingame benefits. For those that think its greedy, you should realize that many hours have already gone into bug fixing and improvements, and a programmer needs to get paid for it, we do not have the unlimited resources of Valve and we require some form of monetization if this mod is to be maintained and improved.

No. Leaver penalty can either be enabled or disabled, we have no control over if its applied to players that leave during the accept game phase. We also have no control over how the game connects you to a lobby when you press Play. We suggest you look for a lobby on the lobby list with a map you actually want to play and join that way.

No. The hero picking phase is not very changeable, the only option would be to entirely recreate a hero pick screen, and not using the default one, this is a possibility for the future but is not being considered right now. There would have to be more benefits to warrant recreating the pick screen.

No, this is completely out of our control. We can only enable or disable the leaver penalty, we can't adjust it.

The banning phase is controversial. Some players love it and some hate it. We as developers have decided that its healthier for the game if players get the opportunity to ban some heroes. Without the ability to ban, some heroes will be always picked, every single time, for example, Sniper in desert_octet, and our thinking was that with banning phase it introduces the possibility of playing more varied games and not being forced to see the same hero every single game.
Banning phase is enabled by one variable, we can either have it enabled or disabled, we can't even adjust the number of bans, or if it's enabled for only other levels. Having it be a votable option is a good idea but the only way to achieve to this would be to recreate the hero picking stage entirely, which is a possibility but would require quite a bit of work.

Yes but we currently don't want to make it too high. We think it's better that players are left wanting more than being tired and fed up by the game going too long.

Yes, but we want to hire a real map maker to create a map of the same quality as the other Overthrow maps. If you want to see new and improved maps consider supporting us on Patreon.

The default behavior of this clone is to be unable to pick up such items, but we agree it should be different for Overthrow, however, it actually requires remaking the ability entirely if we want to enable those functions. Its something we may consider later but it's not a priority right now.

Unfortunately, the hero ban phase is not changeable, not without recreating the whole pick stage. It appears to be based on the number of teams in the game, so in Forest Solo, you can ban many heroes, but in desert_octet you can only ban around 3 heroes, this is an unfortunate side effect of a system that was only designed for two team games.