I don't want to give up on this game just yet.
And you have me for a neighbor!
But, I do agree we might want to speed the turns up a little. Stopping half a week for every person who starts dropping out isn't going to help the people-dropping-out problem. Maybe set the turn to early Sunday and try to keep on track after that (obviously if something big comes up we won't be able to, but it's a slow game anyways so there's not much need otherwise to keep people from staling (unless they chronically procrastinate like me, in which case they (and me) should break the habit))(that was an excessive use of parentheses
).