Yea, that's what I've been saying. Those are things that NEED to be addressed in ep 9 because of the timing. Even the meeting with Sage's parents is going to have a crap ton of things because of who's involved (not even mentioning the "Fuck, fuck, fuck" ending scene for ep 8).
Your reasoning might make sense but I think the main bottleneck for development speed this time around was the long form animations. You could argue that he wasn't just sitting on his hands while the animations were rendering but there were several instances that hinted that he had finished writing the bulk of everything relatively sooner as well as coding.
Even if that's the main reason for such a long development this time around, on the flipside if ep 9 doesn't properly cover all of that (and that might be subjective) then we're looking at one episode a year for about the same amount of story-telling. (That makes sense, right? Since it's just a logical reversal of your hypothesis.)
To add to that, with all the completely separate branching paths because of ep 8 DPC might be thinking he wants to add the same, large amount of content for each path which could contribute to the long development time in the future. So even with some key events out of the way, I don't think it's going to decrease the amount of storyboarding he has to do.
There were already separate paths but there was also a lot overlap. For example: No matter what you still had to go on a tennis date with Jill, you still had to spend the night at Bella's place and do yoga with them in the morning, you could still hook up with Sage while dating everyone else. There were more "path-exclusive" scenes and content as Season 2 progressed but unless you played a specific way, it still felt like there was a lot to see in each episode.
Ep 8 felt kind of empty because of the sheer amount of path-exclusive content. DPC might have been trying to remedy that with ep 9. Which means, if there is at least "3 hours" for each playthrough of an LI then I don't think 1 episode/year is going to change. A counterpoint to that might be that there actually still isn't that much content for each LI in ep 9.
I don't know, there are a lot of factors at play here since this is so unprecedented which is another reason why I think ep 9 is a "make or break" type of situation. Still, because there are so many uncertainties I have no reason to believe that the long dev time is just going to be a one-time thing and I believe this will be the norm going forward.
In the long run, I seriously don't believe it will affect his Patreon but Steam might be a different story. Just for me personally, I just don't think I want to wait around every day for a year again like an idiot. LOL
