His point being, and in my opinion is justified, was you did this on purpose. Its known as clickbait, You purposefully put your reference image up front so its title image and will attract attention and once inside we learn that the project is not anywhere near what we expected. This makes people angry as they feel mislead and in all honesty they were. This is why you got such harsh comments, that feeling of betrayal makes people WANT to be harsh to you as they feel you deserve it. I tend to be guilty of this too, youtube is notorious for this practice of misleading people with a false upfront image or thumbnail. I HATE THAT with a passion and will comment when I otherwise would keep my mean my words myself, thankfully youtube now has a report option specifically for this practice. Something I think all user submission sites should have. Because the reference image excuse is fine and all and you by all means should have one (just not as the front image) but in many cases, yours included as I just noticed how old your post is, the project will never be finished and the reference image is no longer a reference its just a lie, a look at what we will never have and a reminder of how we wasted our time by clicking on that image. No you may not feel the need to impress me, and why would you we don't know each other, but you did apparently feel the need to lie to me and that makes me want to report you, or at least leave a comment.

And the excuse of "I'm not the only one" doesn't justify this practice, I'm not mad you used a reference image to help people see where your project is headed. I'm upset you used it as a way to trick me. And you did it on purpose, the old bait and switch most deff deserves a report, cause here we are 2 years later and your image is still wasting peoples time while your project is dead and gone. You earned this report fair and square.

For your information I wouldn't have reported you for not having the most detailed build, that itself was sarcasm, I know the pmc rules better than that. Also I'm just being honest with you, that picture
whether it was a reference image or not gave a false impression of something grand and extremely detailed. I would have had a more positive response had you mentioned that it was a reference image via caption.

What got me negatively responding was that it gave a false impression as generally speaking you put a caption mentioning it or use a good screenshot as the initial image that the average pmc user would see when they click on it. Just because others have used a fake picture doesn't mean that all people use fake images, or they caption it so that first time viewers see that it's a reference image.