The automated test suite is an excessive maintenance burden for me at this time

Developing and maintaining the automated test suite is soaking up 90% or more of the development effort of this project at this point. I can't say exactly why this ratio is so skewed compared to normal. It may be my unfamiliarity with the testing tools or their inappropriateness for the task at hand.

While it is an unpleasant position to be in to have a code base without a comprehensive automated test suite, at this point I can manually test the whole project's functionality with much less effort than it takes to finish and then maintain the automated test suite.