What's a long time?
I played the most recent version of the game in July of this year and this was my take-away too. That's 5 months ago.
Overindulgent writing, too much focus on how pathetic the main character was for multiple chapters. It could be forgiven if it was good, some of it was but the sheer volume of it was abhorrent.
I remember there being a sex scene with Minerva, underwear and swimsuit scenes. That was the extent of it.
The quests and side-quests were very obtuse, badly explained and tedious to do.
The new stuff might be good but I can't imagine anyone looking forward to replaying the first few chapters of this game. I'm going out on a limb here and say you have a save file that you use for each update and thus you forgot just how bad and long the early parts were.
Now imagine someone new coming in, who does not have the luxury of skipping the, frankly pointless, first 2-3 chapters.