I played through the 2.5 update. Some thoughts:
If I'm being brutally honest, I feel like this has kind of taken one step forward and two steps back. Please do bear in mind, I was massively supportive when you released the previous update. Read this in the spirit of constructive criticism.
There are gonna be some spoilers below, FYI.
The #1 issue, hands down, has not changed - you've got to put out these releases faster. Like, much faster. It was almost a year from the demo to the first version. There was a lot of discussion about this, and you said you were working on getting things better streamlined so you could release things sooner. Then it took... again damn near a year, to get to the next major update.
These releases simply don't contain enough content to justify that timeline. We are now... 2 years from when I first played the game, and the MC has gotten one BJ from a side character (the nurse) and a footjob from ONE of the LIs. And that's about it. For most of the LIs, he has maybe hugged them or like touched their legs or butt for a few minutes. With some of them, literally nothing has happened yet. This would be fine for the second chapter, if we were getting a chapter every couple of months. At the every year pace, it's just too slow man - people are moving on and forgetting about this game. To be clear, I think the pacing of the game would be just fine... if the releases were coming out a lot faster. Those two things kind of have to be in sync.
Overall the content (which is 99% just story advancement via conversations) is decent. I continue to enjoy the character's personalities and antics. But again, particularly with the snail's pace development track we are on, you are gonna have to get some more action happening, people will get bored of just endless talking talking talking and no fucking happening, when they waited about a year for the update.
The focus on Noboku really struck me as odd. We just kept coming back to her storyline... dude I just don't care about her at this point, you already fuckin killed her off before we had any chance to get to know her! The time to tell her story was before she got sucked down to hell or wherever it is, for the serpent to torment her. This strikes me as a really contrived attempt to like, tell a story through flashbacks just for the sake of telling a story through flashbacks, which in my opinion is massively overdone nowadays. The way you did this in other places was fine - like Haya having a little flashback remembering why she got her haircut. But the whole situation with Noboku is strange, you did not get the players invested in her character before killing her off; now any emotional investment in her feels wasted since we already know she's screwed.
There were a lot of wasted opportunities too. For example, early on we have a sleepover scene with a bunch of the girls staying over the MC's home. What happens? ...Nothing. Now, I could see this as just foreshadowing like OK cool maybe this will become a thing, they will be over there again in the future and more things could happen. But when? At that rate we are going, I guess maybe we can hope for an update with something like that in... 1-3 years? Similarly with the bartender, how many scenes were there of them hanging out and drinking and yet... nothing happened between them.
Do you see how big of a problem the slow releases are yet? It's fucking up everything. If you were dropping releases every 1-3 months, a lot of these things would be fine - but knowing that it's probably going to be another year before we see the next one kind of sours the whole perspective/outlook of the player.
Also worth noting, nothing further happened with Mei. WTF man? Last time there was a lot of sexual tension, she straight up sat on his lap and tried to masturbate... and then that's just it? You had the scene where they watched a romantic movie together, but nothing happened. Like, they each went to bed after. The fuck???
IMHO - you need to sit down with your team and set the expectation that this has got to be a bigger commitment than a couple of hours here and there on the weekend.