There's a distinction between a slow burn story and a nothingburger update. Problem is this update doesn't move the story forward nor give any scene of interest. As for not supporting, I've been burned too many times by dev who keep promising the moon but deliver an empty plate. This is until proven a dead game walking. I just don't know when it will get abandoned but for sure it will be before anything of interest happen.
The update is literally called "Free Roam." Not sure what you were expecting. This update saw a massive overhaul to the models used, lots of optimization, and a lot of new systems on top of adding a day/night cycle and calendar system. It basically went from a standard VN with movement to an 'open-world' game in a single update.
By open-world, I just mean that the player can roam around and find scenes and events through exploration.
I also thought the story content that was present was top-notch. It seemed like this time focused a lot on the younger daughter, so I hope next time we see the other characters.
Point being, what you and others are doing is basically seeing an ad to buy a pig and then getting mad it's not a cow after you buy, or in most of you all's case, steal it.
This update set the game to where it needed to be for it to be the kind of game the dev wanted to make. I expect we'll see a lot more focus on story going forward.