I think while using blender to make the game we won't be able to hear that the update has been long.
Well, had suspected you were using Blender (mentioned in one of my previous posts) from the asset (specifically, Lara).
Not sure images with Blender are really better than Daz Studio with Iray or Octane, think it is also a lot a matter of who is doing the scene and the assets used - certainly I would not (but it is my personal opinion) consider Daz good for animations.
But I noticed people tend to get "religious" about this kind of things, I prefer to be more practical.
You wrote "while using blender", but if you have become used to it and have the assets, getting to learn a new tool and try to make sure you have the same assets would make for a big time investment and long delays - plus, as I wrote, in the case of Daz I believe Daz is better in terms of easiness of posing, reusing stuff and quantity of assets, but in terms of result for animation I think it not very friendly, and you use lots of good animations in the game.
We will just have to get used to it, and at worst, play every two updates to have more content
, anyway if you manage to +/- keep the "monthly update" schedule, it will be better than many other games
By the way, a curiosity. In my Daz library I have a Lara Croft model for G3F that I think got from ShareCG (I remember it was free), I never really used because the textures were completely off, it was an early beta (it is numbered something like 0.2 or 0.3), but the author of that model was a Desdraw, anything to do with you ?