I felt I gave a pretty balanced view on it overall. I’m indifferent to the changes for now until I know better. Any claim that it’s shifted more towards P2W is a leap considering it’s so early we don’t know how well free players will progress compared to paying players. I would’ve hated it for Neo Monsters but for Evertale it does somewhat fit the direction they were going for, despite being a big shift in style. I was expecting the update to be very different to what we got. Being indifferent to an update is a big difference from what it could’ve been if it was a good expansion of content.
As for not updating during their announcement time window… they originally had things planned for October. My guess is a large part of the delay was from the app stores rejecting the update. Certainly the last delay of a few days past the time window they said in the game was due to app stores taking longer than expected to approve the update. That’s completely out of their hands.