How to get players to stay bought in with proactive roleplay?

Hi, first post here.

I've been DMing 5e for my friend group for going on 6 years now. In the last year I've been trying to use the principles of proactive roleplay, to highly mixed success.

We play remotely, due to geography, which obviously introduces quirks and nuances not present at an in person table. Personally, I think it weakens the community element, but short of a significant lottery win I don't see how to change that.

But getting people to send me their goals is unreasonably difficult. I've made it as low friction as I can, with a shared Google Sheet. They can punch in goals, things they want their character to buy, a wishlist of sorts for items, a column for little downtime activities. They've got a box each to tick when they're done. Doesn't mean I need a weekly update, so long as that box gets ticked each week and I know I can export that to a to-do list for prep.

In the last 3 months I can only count 2 weeks where that tickbox has been done by the whole group. This week, none of them did so.

We've had discussions, and people have said in the past that they're all in on the idea; they like it and think it makes for a better campaign. But they don't follow through on their part. 2 of the 4 have DMed, so they know that prep can be a slog. Something a player wants to do, that they came up with with a few minutes, can turn into hours of finding/making maps, picking enemies, writing NPCS etc etc.

Right now, I'm in a bit of a hole of being angry and disappointed. I've written 3 different drafts of what I want to say, but I don't know if any really hit the core issue well enough.

Part of me wants to just take "carry on and try to do better" off the table. We've been there before, and people did not do better. Some did worse. The other ideas I have are less satisfying, like dropping the approach entirely, or don't hit the real problem, like moving to a fortnightly game to give them more time.

So how do people keep their groups on track?

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